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Title: Paradoxes of Catholicism

Author: Robert Hugh Benson

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PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM

BY ROBERT HUGH BENSON

_These sermons (which the following pages contain in a much abbreviated

form) were delivered, partly in England in various places and at various

times, partly in New York in the Lent of 1912, and finally, as a

complete course, in the church of S. Silvestro-in-Capite, in Rome, in

the Lent of 1913. Some of the ideas presented in this book have already

been set out in a former volume entitled "Christ in the Church" and a

few in the meditations upon the Seven Words, in another volume, but in

altogether other connexions. The author thought it better, therefore, to

risk repetition rather than incoherency in the present set of

considerations. It is hoped that the repetitions are comparatively few.

Italics have been used for all quotations, whether verbal or

substantial, from Holy Scripture and other literature_.

ROBERT HUGH BENSON

HARE STREET HOUSE, BUNTINGFORD

EASTER, 1913

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY

(i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN

(ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN

I PEACE AND WAR

II WEALTH AND POVERTY

III SANCTITY AND SIN

IV JOY AND SORROW

V LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN

VI FAITH AND REASON

VII AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY

VIII CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM

IX MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE

X THE SEVEN WORDS

XI LIFE AND DEATH

PARADOXES OF CATHOLICISM

INTRODUCTORY

(i) JESUS CHRIST, GOD AND MAN

_I and My Father are one_.--JOHN X. 30.

_My Father is greater than I_.--JOHN XIV. 20.

The mysteries of the Church, a materialistic scientist once announced to

an astonished world, are child's play compared with the mysteries of

nature.[1] He was completely wrong, of course, yet there was every

excuse for his mistake. For, as he himself tells us in effect, he found

everywhere in that created nature which he knew so well, anomaly piled

on anomaly and paradox on paradox, and he knew no more of theology than

its simpler and more explicit statements.

[Footnote 1: Professor Huxley.]

We can be certain therefore--we who understand that the mysteries of

nature are, after all, within the limited circle of created life, while

the mysteries of grace run up into the supreme Mystery of the eternal

and uncreated Life of God--we can be certain that, if nature is

mysterious and paradoxical, grace will be incalculably more mysterious.

For every paradox in the world of matter, in whose environment our

bodies are confined, we shall find a hundred in that atmosphere of

spirit in which our spirits breathe and move--those spirits of ours

which, themselves, paradoxically enough, are forced to energize under

material limitations.

We need look no further, then, to find these mysteries than to that tiny

mirror of the Supernatural which we call our self, to that little thread

of experience which we name the "spiritual life." How is it, for

example, that while in one mood our religion is the lamp of our shadowy

existence, in another it is the single dark spot upon a world of

pleasure--in one mood the single thing that makes life worth living at

all, and in another the one obstacle to our contentment? What are those

sorrowful and joyful mysteries of human life, mutually contradictory yet

together resultant (as in the Rosary itself) in others that are

glorious? Turn to that master passion that underlies these

mysteries--the passion that is called love--and see if there be anything

more inexplicable than such an explanation. What is this passion, then,

that turns joy to sorrow and sorrow to joy--this motive that drives a

man to lose his life that he may save it, that turns bitter to sweet and

makes the cross but a light yoke after all, that causes him to find his

centre outside his own circle, and to please himself best by depriving

himself of pleasure? What is that power that so often fills us with

delights before we have begun to labour, and rewards our labour with

the darkness of dereliction?

I. If our interior life, then, is full of paradox and apparent

contradiction--and there is no soul that has made any progress that does

not find it so--we should naturally expect that the Divine Life of Jesus

Christ on earth, which is the central Objective Light of the World

reflected in ourselves, should be full of yet more amazing anomalies.

Let us examine the records of that Life and see if it be not so. And let

us for that purpose begin by imagining such an examination to be made by

an inquirer who has never received the Christian tradition.

(i) He begins to read, of course, with the assumption that this Life is

as others and this Man as other men; and as he reads he finds a hundred

corroborations of the theory. Here is one, born of a woman, hungry and

thirsty by the wayside, increasing in wisdom; one who works in a

carpenter's shop; rejoices and sorrows; one who has friends and enemies;

who is forsaken by the one and insulted by the other--who passes, in

fact, through all those experiences of human life to which mankind is

subject--one who dies like other men and is laid in a grave.

Even the very marvels of that Life he seeks to explain by the marvellous

humanity of its hero. He can imagine, as one such inquirer has said, how

the magic of His presence was so great--the magic of His simple yet

perfect humanity--that the blind opened their eyes to see the beauty of

His face and the deaf their ears to hear Him.

Yet, as he reads further, he begins to meet his problems. If this Man

were man only, however perfect and sublime, how is it that His sanctity

appears to run by other lines than those of other saints? Other perfect

men as they approached perfection were most conscious of imperfection;

other saints as they were nearer God lamented their distance from Him;

other teachers of the spiritual life pointed always away from themselves

and their shortcomings to that Eternal Law to which they too aspired.

Yet with this Man all seems reversed. He, as He stood before the world,

called on men to imitate Him; not, as other leaders have done, to avoid

His sins: this Man, so far from pointing forward and up, pointed to

Himself as the Way to the Father; so far from adoring a Truth to which

He strove, named Himself its very incarnation; so far from describing a

Life to which He too one day hoped to rise, bade His hearers look on

Himself Who was their Life; so far from deploring to His friends the

sins under which He laboured, challenged His enemies to find within Him

any sin at all. There is an extraordinary Self-consciousness in Him that

has in it nothing of "self" as usually understood.

Then it may be, at last, that our inquirer approaches the Gospel with a

new assumption. He has been wrong, he thinks, in his interpretation that

such a Life as this was human at all. "_Never man spake like this

man_." He echoes from the Gospel, "_What manner of man is this that even

the winds and the sea obey Him_? How, after all," he asks himself,

"could a man be born without a human father, how rise again from the

dead upon the third day?" Or, "How even could such marvels be related at

all of one who was no more than other men?"

So once more he begins. Here, he tells himself, is the old fairy story

come true; here is a God come down to dwell among men; here is the

solution of all his problems. And once more he finds himself bewildered.

For how can God be weary by the wayside, labour in a shop, and die upon

a cross? How can the Eternal Word be silent for thirty years? How can

the Infinite lie in a manger? How can the Source of Life be subject to

death?

He turns in despair, flinging himself from theory to theory--turns to

the words of Christ Himself, and the perplexity deepens with every

utterance. If Christ be man, how can He say, _My Father and I are one_?

If Christ be God, how can He proclaim that _His Father is greater than

He_? If Christ be Man, how can He say, _Before Abraham was, I am_? If

Christ be God, how can He name Himself _the Son of Man_.

(ii) Turn to the spiritual teaching of Jesus Christ, and once more

problem follows problem, and paradox, paradox.

Here is He Who came to soothe men's sorrows and to give rest to the

weary, He Who offers a sweet yoke and a light burden, telling them that

no man can be His disciple who will not take up the heaviest of all

burdens and follow Him uphill. Here is one, the Physician of souls and

bodies, Who _went about doing good_, Who set the example of activity in

God's service, pronouncing the silent passivity of Mary as the better

part that shall not be taken away from her. Here at one moment He turns

with the light of battle in His eyes, bidding His friends who have not

swords to _sell their cloaks and buy them_; and at another bids those

swords to be sheathed, since _His Kingdom is not of this world_. Here is

the Peacemaker, at one time pronouncing His benediction on those who

make peace, and at another crying that He _came to bring not peace but a

sword_. Here is He Who names as _blessed those that mourn_ bidding His

disciples to _rejoice and be exceeding glad_. Was there ever such a

Paradox, such perplexity, and such problems? In His Person and His

teaching alike there seems no rest and no solution--_What think ye of

Christ? Whose Son is He_?

II. (i) The Catholic teaching alone, of course, offers a key to these

questions; yet it is a key that is itself, like all keys, as complicated

as the wards which it alone can unlock. Heretic after heretic has sought

for simplification, and heretic after heretic has therefore come to

confusion. Christ is God, cried the Docetic; therefore cut out from the

Gospels all that speaks of the reality of His Manhood! God cannot bleed

and suffer and die; God cannot weary; God cannot feel the sorrows of

man. Christ is Man, cries the modern critic; therefore tear out from the

Gospels His Virgin Birth and His Resurrection! For none but a Catholic

can receive the Gospels as they were written; none but a man who

believes that Christ is both God and Man, who is content to believe that

and to bow before the Paradox of paradoxes that we call the Incarnation,

to accept the blinding mystery that Infinite and Finite Natures were

united in one Person, that the Eternal expresses Himself in Time, and

that the Uncreated Creator united to Himself Creation--none but a

Catholic, in a word, can meet, without exception, the mysterious

phenomena of Christ's Life.

(ii) Turn now again to the mysteries of our own limited life and, as in

a far-off phantom parallel, we begin to understand.

For we too, in our measure, have a double nature. _As God and Man make

one Christ, so soul and body make one man_: and, as the two natures of

Christ--as His Perfect Godhead united to His Perfect Manhood--lie at the

heart of the problems which His Life presents, so too our affinities

with the clay from which our bodies came, and with the Father of Spirits

Who inbreathed into us living souls, explain the contradictions of our

own experience.

If we were but irrational beasts, we could be as happy as the beasts;

if we were but discarnate spirits that look on God, the joy of the

angels would be ours. Yet if we assume either of these two truths as if

it were the only truth, we come certainly to confusion. If we live as

the beasts, we cannot sink to their contentment, for our immortal part

will not let us be; if we neglect or dispute the rightful claims of the

body, that very outraged body drags our immortal spirit down. The

acceptance of the two natures of Christ alone solves the problems of the

Gospel; the acceptance of the two parts of our own nature alone enables

us to live as God intends. Our spiritual and physical moods, then, rise

and fall as the one side or the other gains the upper hand: now our

religion is a burden to the flesh, now it is the exercise in which our

soul delights; now it is the one thing that makes life worth living, now

the one thing that checks our enjoyment of life. These moods alternate,

inevitably and irresistibly, according as we allow the balance of our

parts to be disturbed and set swaying. And so, ultimately, there is

reserved for us the joy neither of beasts nor of angels, but the joy of

humanity. We are higher than the one, we are lower than the other, that

we may be crowned by Him Who in that same Humanity sits on the Throne of

God.

So much, then, for our introduction. We have seen how the Paradox of the

Incarnation alone is adequate to the phenomena recorded in the

Gospel--how that supreme paradox is the key to all the rest. We will

proceed to see how it is also the key to other paradoxes of religion, to

the difficulties which the history of Catholicism presents. For the

Catholic Church is the extension of Christ's Life on earth; the Catholic

Church, therefore, that strange mingling of mystery and common-sense,

that union of earth and heaven, of clay and fire, can alone be

understood by him who accepts her as both Divine and Human, since she is

nothing else but the mystical presentment, in human terms, of Him Who,

though the Infinite God and the Eternal Creator, was _found in the form

of a servant_, of Him Who, _dwelling always in the Bosom of the Father_,

for our sakes _came down from heaven_.

(ii) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, DIVINE AND HUMAN

_Blessed art thou Simon Bar-jona; because flesh and blood hath not

revealed it to thee, but My Father Who is in heaven.... Go behind me,

satan, for thou savourest not the things that are of God, but the things

that are of men_.--MATT. XVI. 17, 23.

We have seen how the only reconciliation of the paradoxes of the Gospel

lies in the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation. It is only to him who

believes that Jesus Christ is perfect God and perfect Man that the

Gospel record is coherent and intelligible. The heretics--men who for

the most part either rejected or added to the inspired record--were

those who, on the one side, accepted Christ's Divinity and rejected the

proofs of His Humanity, or accepted His Humanity and rejected the proofs

of His Divinity. In the early ages, for the most part, these accepted

His Divinity and, rejecting His Humanity, invented childish miracles

which they thought appropriate to a God dwelling on earth in a phantom

manhood; at the present day, rejecting His Divinity, they reject also

those miracles for which His Divinity alone is an adequate explanation.

Now the Catholic Church is an extension of the Incarnation. She too

(though, as we shall see, the parallel is not perfect) has her Divine

and Human Nature, which alone can account for the paradoxes of her

history; and these paradoxes are either predicted by Christ--asserted,

that is, as part of His spiritual teaching--or actually manifested in

His own life. (We may take them as symbolised, so to speak, in those

words of our Lord to St. Peter in which He first commends him as a man

inspired by God and then, almost simultaneously, rebukes him as one who

can rise no further than an earthly ideal at the best.)

I. (i) Just as we have already imagined a well-disposed inquirer

approaching for the first time the problems of the Gospel, so let us now

again imagine such a man, in whom the dawn of faith has begun,

encountering the record of Catholicism.

At first all seems to him Divine. He sees, for example, how singularly

unique she is, how unlike to all other human societies. Other societies

depend for their very existence upon a congenial human environment; she

flourishes in the most uncongenial. Other societies have their day and

pass down to dissolution and corruption; she alone knows no corruption.

Other dynasties rise and fall; the dynasty of Peter the Fisherman

remains unmoved. Other causes wax and wane with the worldly influence

which they can command; she is usually most effective when her earthly

interest is at the lowest ebb.

Or again, he falls in love with her Divine beauty and perceives even in

her meanest acts a grace which he cannot understand. He notices with

wonder how she takes human mortal things--a perishing pagan language, a

debased architecture, an infant science or philosophy--and infuses into

them her own immortality. She takes the superstitions of a country-side

and, retaining their "accidents," transubstantiates them into truth; the

customs or rites of a pagan society, and makes them the symbols of a

living worship. And into all she infuses a spirit that is all her own--a

spirit of delicate grace and beauty of which she alone has the secret.

It is her Divinity, then, that he sees, and rightly. But, wrongly, he

draws certain one-sided conclusions. If she is so perfect, he argues (at

least subconsciously), she can be nothing else than perfect; if she is

so Divine she can be in no sense human. Her pontiffs must all be saints,

her priests shining lights, her people stars in her firmament. If she is

Divine, her policy must be unerring, her acts all gracious, her lightest

movements inspired. There must be no brutality anywhere, no

self-seeking, no ambition, no instability. How should there be, since

she is Divine?

Such are his first instincts. And then, little by little, his

disillusionment begins.

For, as he studies her record more deeply, he begins to encounter

evidences of her Humanity. He reads history, and he discovers here and

there a pontiff who but little in his moral character resembles Him

Whose Vicar he is. He meets an apostate priest; he hears of some

savagery committed in Christ's name; he talks with a convert who has

returned complacently to the City of Confusion; there is gleefully

related to him the history of a family who has kept the faith all

through the period of persecution and lost it in the era of toleration.

And he is shaken and dismayed. "How can these be in a Society that is

Divine? I had _trusted_ that it had been_ She _who should have redeemed

Israel;_ _and now--_!"

(ii) Another man approaches the record of Catholicism from the opposite

direction. To him she is a human society and nothing more; and he finds,

indeed, a thousand corroborations of his theory. He views her amazing

success in the first ages of Christianity--the rapid propagation of her

tenets and the growth of her influence--and sees behind these things

nothing more than the fortunate circumstance of the existence of the

Roman Empire. Or he notices the sudden and rapid rise of the power of

the Roman pontiff and explains this by the happy chance that moved the

centre of empire to the east and left in Rome an old prestige and an

empty throne. He sees how the Church has profited by the divisions in

Europe; how she has inherited the old Latin genius for law and order;

and he finds in these things an explanation of her unity and of her

claim to rule princes and kings. She is to him just human, and no more.

There is not, at first sight, a phenomenon of her life for which he

cannot find a human explanation. She is interesting, as a result of

innumerable complicated forces; she is venerable, as the oldest coherent

society in Europe; she has the advantage of Italian diplomacy; she has

been shrewd, unweary, and persevering. But she is no more.

And then, as he goes deeper, he begins to encounter phenomena which do

not fall so easily under his compact little theories. If she is merely

human, why do not the laws of all other human societies appear to affect

her too? Why is it that she alone shows no incline towards dissolution

and decay? Why has not she too split up into the component parts of

which she is welded? How is it that she has preserved a unity of which

all earthly unities are but shadows? Or he meets with the phenomena of

her sanctity and begins to perceive that the difference between the

character she produces in her saints and the character of the noblest of

those who do not submit to her is one of kind and not merely of degree.

If she is merely mediaeval, how is it that she commands such allegiance

as that which is paid to her in modern America? If she is merely

European, how is it that she alone can deal with the Oriental on his own

terms? If she is merely the result of temporal circumstances, how is it

that her spiritual influence shows no sign of waning when the forces

that helped to build her are dispersed?

His theory too, then, becomes less confident. If she is Human, why is

she so evidently Divine? If she is Divine, whence comes her obvious

Humanity? So years ago men asked, If Christ be God, how could He be

weary by the wayside and die upon the Cross? So men ask now, If Christ

be Man, how could He cast out devils and rise from the dead?

II. We come back, then, to the Catholic answer. Treat the Catholic

Church as Divine only and you will stumble over her scandals, her

failures, and her shortcomings. Treat her as Human only and you will be

silenced by her miracles, her sanctity, and her eternal resurrections.

(i) Of course the Catholic Church is Human. She consists of fallible

men, and her Humanity is not even safeguarded as was that of Christ

against the incursions of sin. Always, therefore, there have been

scandals, and always will be. Popes may betray their trust, in all human

matters; priests their flocks; laymen their faith. No man is secure.

And, again, since she is human it is perfectly true that she has

profited by human circumstances for the increase of her power.

Undoubtedly it was the existence of the Roman Empire, with its roads,

its rapid means of transit, and its organization, that made possible the

swift propagation of the Gospel in the first centuries. Undoubtedly it

was the empty throne of Caesar and the prestige of Rome that developed

the world's acceptance of the authority of Peter's Chair. Undoubtedly

it was the divisions of Europe that cemented the Church's unity and led

men to look to a Supreme Authority that might compose their differences.

There is scarcely an opening in human affairs into which she has not

plunged; hardly an opportunity she has missed. Human affairs, human sins

and weaknesses as well as human virtues, have all contributed to her

power. So grows a tree, even in uncongenial soil. The rocks that impede

the roots later become their support; the rich soil, waiting for an

occupant, has been drawn up into the life of the leaves; the very winds

that imperilled the young sapling have developed too its power of

resistance. Yet these things do not make the tree.

(ii) For her Humanity, though it is the body in which her Divinity

dwells, does not create that Divinity. Certainly human circumstances

have developed her, yet what but Divine Providence ordered and developed

those human circumstances? What but that same power, which indwells in

the Church, dwelt without her too and caused her to take root at that

time and in that place which most favored her growth? Certainly she is

Human. It may well be that her rulers have contradicted one another in

human matters--in science, in policy, and in discipline; but how is it,

then, that they have not contradicted one another in matters that are

Divine? Granted that one Pope has reversed the policy of his

predecessor, then what has saved him from reversing his theology also?

Certainly there have been appalling scandals, outrageous sinners,

blaspheming apostates--but what of her saints?

And, above all, she gives proof of her Divinity by that very sign to

which Christ Himself pointed as a proof of His own. Granted that she

_dies daily_--that her cause fails in this century and in that country;

that her science is discredited in this generation and her active

morality in that and her ideals in a third--how comes it that she also

rises daily from the dead; that her old symbols rise again from their

ruins; that her virtues are acclaimed by the children of the men who

renounced her; that her bells and her music sound again where once her

churches and houses were laid waste?

Here, then, is the Catholic answer and it is this alone that makes sense

of history, as it is Catholic doctrine which alone makes sense of the

Gospel record. The answer is identical in both cases alike, and it is

this--that the only explanation of the phenomena of the Gospels and of

Church history is that the Life which produces them is both Human and

Divine.

I

PEACE AND WAR

_Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the

children of God._--MATT. V. 9.

_Do not think that I am come to send peace on earth; I

came not to send peace but the sword._--MATT. X. 34.

We have considered how the key to the Paradoxes of the Gospel and the

key to the Paradoxes of Catholicism is one and the same--that the Life

that produces them is at once Divine and Human. Let us go on to consider

how this resolves those of Catholicism, especially those charged against

us by our adversaries.

For we live in a day when Catholicism is no longer considered by

intelligent men to be too evidently absurd to be argued with. Definite

reasons are given by those who stand outside our borders for the

attitude they maintain; definite accusations are made which must either

be allowed or refuted.

Now those who stand without the walls of the City of Peace know nothing,

it is true, of the life that its citizens lead within, nothing of the

harmony and consolation that Catholicism alone can give. Yet of certain

points, it may be, in the large outlines of that city against the sky,

of the place it occupies in the world, of its wide effect upon human

life in general, it may very well be that these detached observers may

know more than the devout who dwell at peace within. Let us, then,

consider their reflections not necessarily as wholly false; it may be

that they have caught glimpses which we have missed and relations which

either we take too much for granted or have failed altogether to see. It

may be that these accusations will turn out to be our credentials in

disguise.

I. Every world-religion, we are told, worthy of the name has as its

principal object and its chief claim to consideration its establishing

or its fostering of peace among men. Supremely this was so in the first

days of Christianity. It was this that its great prophet predicted of

its work when its Divine Founder should come on earth. Nature shall

recover its lost harmony and the dissensions of men shall cease when He,

the Prince of Peace, shall approach. The very beasts shall lie down

together in amity, _the lion and the lamb_ and _the leopard and the

kid_. Further, it was the Message of Peace that the angels proclaimed

over His cradle in Bethlehem; it was the Gift of Peace which He Himself

promised to His disciples; it was the _Peace of God which passeth

knowledge_ to which the great Apostle commended his converts. This then,

we are told, is of the very essence of Christianity; this is the supreme

benediction on the peacemakers that _they shall be called the children

of God_.

Yet, when we turn to Catholicism, we are bidden to see in it not a

gatherer but a scatterer, not the daughter of peace but the mother of

disunion. Is there a single tormented country in Europe to-day, it is

rhetorically demanded, that does not owe at least part of its misery to

the claims of Catholicism? What is it but Catholicism that lies at the

heart of the divided allegiance of France, of the miseries of Portugal,

and of the dissensions of Italy? Look back through history and you will

find the same tale everywhere. What was it that disturbed the politics

of England so often from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, and tore

her in two in the sixteenth, but the determined resistance of an

adolescent nation to the tyranny of Rome? What lay behind the religious

wars of Europe, behind the fires of Smithfield, the rack of Elizabeth,

and the blood of St. Bartholomew's Day but this intolerant and

intolerable religion which would come to no terms even with the most

reasonable of its adversaries? It is impossible, of course, altogether

to apportion blame, to say that in each several instance it was the

Catholic that was the aggressor; but at least it is true to say that it

was Catholic principles that were the occasion and Catholic claims the

unhappy cause of all this incalculable flood of human misery.

How singularly unlike, then, we are told, is this religion of

dissension to the religion of Jesus Christ, of all these dogmatic and

disciplinary claims and assertions to the meekness of the Poor Man of

Nazareth! If true Christianity is anywhere in the world to-day it is not

among such as these that it lies hid; rather it must be sought among the

gentle humanitarians of our own and every country--men who strive for

peace at all cost, men whose principal virtues are those of toleration

and charity, men who, if any, have earned the beatitude of being _called

the children of God_.

II. We turn to the Life of Jesus Christ from the Life of Catholicism,

and at first indeed it does seem as if the contrast were justified. We

cannot deny our critic's charges; every one of his historical assertions

is true: it is indeed true that Catholicism has been the occasion of

more bloodshedding than has any of the ambitions or jealousies of man.

And it is, further, true that Jesus Christ pronounced this benediction;

that He bade His followers seek after peace, and that He commended them,

in the very climax of His exaltation, to the Peace which He alone could

bestow.

Yet, when we look closer, the case is not so simple. For, first, what

was, as a matter of fact, the direct immediate effect of the Life and

Personality of Jesus Christ upon the society in which He lived but this

very dissension, this very bloodshedding and misery that are charged

against His Church? It was precisely on this account that He was given

into the hands of Pilate. _He stirreth up the people. He makes Himself a

King._ He is a contentious demagogue, a disloyal citizen, a danger to

the Roman Peace.

And indeed there seem to have been excuses for these charges. It was not

the language of a modern "humanitarian," of the modern tolerant

"Christian," that fell from the Divine Lips of Jesus Christ. _Go and

tell that fox_, He cries of the ruler of His people. _O you whited

sepulchres full of dead men's bones! You vipers! You hypocrites!_ This

is the language He uses to the representatives of Israel's religion. Is

this the kind of talk that we hear from modern leaders of religious

thought? Would such language as this be tolerated for a moment from the

humanitarian Christian pulpits of to-day? Is it possible to imagine more

inflammatory speech, more "unchristian sentiments," as they would be

called to-day, than those words uttered by none other but the Divine

Founder of Christianity? What of that amazing scene when He threw the

furniture about the temple courts?

And as for the effect of such words and methods, our Lord Himself is

quite explicit. "Make no mistake," He cries to the modern humanitarian

who claims alone to represent Him. "Make no mistake. I am _not come to

bring peace_ at any price; there are worse things than war and

bloodshed. I am _come to bring not peace but a sword_. I am come to

_divide families_, not to unite them; to rend kingdoms, not to knit

them up; I am come _to set mother against daughter and daughter against

mother_; I am come not to establish universal toleration, but universal

Truth."

What, then, is the reconciliation of the Paradox? In what sense can it

be possible that the effect of the Personality of the Prince of Peace,

and therefore the effect of His Church, in spite of their claims to be

the friends of peace, should be _not peace, but the sword?_

III. Now (1) the Catholic Church is a Human Society. She is constituted,

that is to say, of human beings; she depends, humanly speaking, upon

human circumstances; she can be assaulted, weakened, and disarmed by

human enemies. She dwells in the midst of human society, and it is with

human society that she has to deal.

Now if she were not human--if she were merely a Divine Society, a

far-off city in the heavens, a future distant ideal to which human

society is approximating, there would be no conflict at all. She would

never meet in a face-to-face shock the passions and antagonisms of men;

she could suppress, now and again, her Counsels of Perfection, her calls

to a higher life, if it were not that these are vital and present

principles which she is bound to propagate among men.

And again, if she were merely human, there would be no conflict. If she

were merely ascended from below, merely the result of the finest

religious thought of the world, the high-water mark of spiritual

attainment, again she could compromise, could suppress, could be silent.

But she is both human and divine, and therefore her warfare is certain

and inevitable. For she dwells in the midst of the kingdoms of this

world, and these are constituted, at any rate at the present day, on

wholly human bases. Statesmen and kings, at the present day, do not

found their policies upon supernatural considerations; their object is

to govern their subjects, to promote the peace and union of their

subjects, to make war, if need be, on behalf of the peace of their

subjects, wholly on natural grounds. Commerce, finance, agriculture,

education in the things of this world, science, art, exploration--human

activities generally--these, in their purely natural aspect, are the

objects of nearly all modern statesmanship. Our rulers are professedly,

in their public capacity, neither for religion nor against it; religion

is a private matter for the individual, and governments stand aside--or

at any rate profess to do so.

And it is in this kind of world, in this fashion of human society, that

the Catholic Church, in virtue of her humanity, is bound to dwell. She

too is a kingdom, though not of this world, yet in it.

(2) For she is also Divine. Her message contains, that is to say, a

number of supernatural principles revealed to her by God; she is

supernaturally constituted; she rests on a supernatural basis; she is

not organized as if this world were all. On the contrary she puts the

kingdom of God definitely first and the kingdoms of the world definitely

second; the Peace of God first and the harmony of men second.

Therefore she is bound, when her supernatural principles clash with

human natural principles, to be the occasion of disunion. Her marriage

laws, as a single example, are at conflict with the marriage laws of the

majority of modern States. It is of no use to tell her to modify these

principles; it would be to tell her to cease to be supernatural, to

cease to be herself. How can she modify what she believes to be her

Divine Message?

Again, since she is organized on a supernatural basis, there are

supernatural elements in her own constitution which she can no more

modify than her dogmas. Recently, in France, she was offered the

_kingdom of this world_ if she would do so; it was proposed to her that

she actually retain her own wealth, her churches and her houses, and

yield up her principle of spiritual appeal to the Vicar of Christ. If

she had been but human, how evident would have been her duty! How

inevitable that she should modify her constitution in accordance with

human ideas and preserve her property intact! And how entirely

impossible such a bargain must be for a Society that is divine as well

as human!

Take courage then! We desire peace above all things--that is to say, the

Peace of God, not _that peace which the world_, since it _can give_ it,

can also _take away_; not that peace which depends on the harmony of

nature with nature, but of nature with grace.

Yet, so long as the world is divided in allegiance; so long as the

world, or a country, or a family, or even an individual soul bases

itself upon natural principles divorced from divine, so long to that

world, that country, that family, and that human heart will the

supernatural religion of Catholicism bring _not peace, but a sword_. And

it will do so to the end, up to the final world-shattering catastrophe

of Armageddon itself.

"I come," cries the Rider on the White Horse, "to bring Peace indeed,

but a peace of which the world cannot even dream; a peace built upon the

eternal foundations of God Himself, not upon the shifting sands of human

agreement. And until that Vision dawns there must be war; until God's

Peace descends indeed and is accepted, till then _My Garments must be

splashed in blood_ and from My Mouth comes forth _not peace, but a

two-edged sword_."

II

WEALTH AND POVERTY

_Make to yourselves friends of the Mammon of iniquity_.

_You cannot serve God and Mammon_.-LUKE XVI. 9, 13.

We have seen how the Church of the Prince of Peace must continually be

the centre of war. Let us go on to consider how, as a Human Society

dwelling in this world, she must continually have her eyes fixed upon

the next, and how, as a Divine Society, she must be open to the charge

of worldliness.

I. (i) The charge is a very common one: "Look at the extraordinary

wealth and splendour that this Church of the Poor Man of Nazareth

constantly gathers around her and ask yourself how she can dare to claim

to represent Him! Go through Holy Rome and see how the richest and most

elaborate buildings bear over their gateways the heraldic emblems of

Christ's Vicar! Go through any country which has not risen in disgust

and cast off the sham that calls herself 'Christ's Church' and you will

find that no worldly official is so splendid as these heavenly delegates

of Jesus Christ, no palaces more glorious than those in which they dwell

who pretend to preach Him who _had not where to lay His head!_

"Above all, turn from that simple poverty-stricken figure that the

Gospels present to us, to the man who claims to be His Vicegerent on

earth. See him go, crowned three times over, on a throne borne on men's

shoulders, with the silver trumpets shrilling before him and the ostrich

fans coming on behind, and you will understand why the world cannot take

the Church seriously. Look at the court that is about him, all purple

and scarlet, and set by that the little band of weather-beaten

fishermen!

"No; if this Church were truly of Christ, she would imitate Him better.

It was His supreme mission to point to _things that are above;_ to lift

men's thoughts above dross and gold and jewels and worldly influence and

high places and power; to point to _a Heavenly Jerusalem, not made with

hands;_ to comfort the sorrowful with a vision of future peace, not to

dabble with temporal matters; to speak of grace and heaven and things to

come, and _to let the dead bury their dead!_ The best we can do for her,

then, is to disembarrass her of her riches; to turn her temporal

possessions to frankly temporal ends; to release her from the slavery of

her own ambition into the _liberty of the poor and the children of

God!"_

(ii) In a word, then, the Church is too worldly to be the Church of

Christ! _You cannot serve God and Mammon_. Yet in another mood our

critic will tell us that we are too otherworldly to be the Church of

Christ. "The chief charge I have against Catholicism," says such a man,

"is that the Church is too unpractical. If she were truly the Church of

Jesus Christ, she would surely imitate Him better in that which, after

all, was the mark of His highest Divinity--namely in His Humanity

towards men. Christ did not come into the world to preach metaphysics

and talk forever of a heaven that is to come; He came rather to attend

to men's simplest needs, _to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked_, to

reform society on better lines. It was not by His dogma that He won

men's hearts; it was by His simple, natural sympathy with their common

needs. He came, in a word, to make the best of this world, to use the

elements that lay ready to His hand, to sanctify all the plain things of

earth with which He came in contact.

"These otherworldly Catholics, then, are too much apart from common life

and common needs. Their dogmas and their aspirations and their

metaphysics are useless to a world which wants bread. Let them act more

and dream less! Let them show, for example, by the prosperity of

Catholic countries that Catholicism is practical and not a vision. Let

them preach less and philanthropize more. Let them show that they have

the key to this world's progress, and perhaps we will listen more

patiently to their claim to hold the key to the world that is to come!"

But, surely, this is a little hard upon Catholics! When we make

ourselves at home in this world, we are informed that Jesus Christ _had

not where to lay His Head_. When we preach the world that is to come,

we are reminded that Jesus Christ after all came down from that world

into this to make it better. When we build a comfortable church, we are

told that we are too luxurious. When we build an uncomfortable one we

are asked how we expect to do any good unless we are practical.

II. Now, of course, both these charges were also objected against our

Blessed Lord. For He too had His double activities. It is true that

there were times when He gave men earthly bread; it is also true that He

offered them heavenly bread. There were times when He cared for men's

bodies; there were other times when He bade them sacrifice all that

makes bodily life worth living; times when He sat at meat in the house

of a rich man, and times when He starved, voluntarily, in the desert.

And the world found Him wrong whichever He did. He was too worldly when

He healed men on the Sabbath; for is not the Law of God of more value

than a man's bodily ease? Why can He not wait till to-morrow? He was too

worldly when He allowed His disciples to rub corn in their hands; for

does not the Law of God forbid a man to make bread on the Sabbath? He

was too worldly, too unpractical, too sense-loving when He permitted the

precious ointment to be spilled on His feet; _for might not this

ointment have been sold for much and given to the poor?_ Is not

spirituality enough, and the incense of adoration?

And He was too otherworldly when He preached the Sermon on the Mount.

What is the use of saying, _Blessed are the Meek_, when the whole world

knows that "Blessed are the Self-Assertive"? He was too otherworldly

when He spoke of Heavenly Bread. What is the use of speaking of Heavenly

Bread when it is earthly food that men need first of all? He was too

otherworldly when He remained in the country on the feast day. _If He be

the Christ_, let Him be practical and say so!

It was, in fact, on these very two charges that He was arraigned for

death. He was too worldly for Pilate, in that He was Son of Man and

therefore a rival to Caesar; and too otherworldly for Caiphas, since _He

made Himself Son of God_ and therefore a rival to Jehovah.

III. The solution, then, of this Catholic Paradox is very simple. (i)

First, the Church is a Heavenly Society come down from above--heavenly

in her origin and her birth. She is the _kingdom of God_, first and

foremost, and exists for His glory solely and entirely. She seeks, then,

first the extension of His kingdom; and compared with this, nothing is

of any value in her eyes. Never, then, must she sacrifice God to Mammon;

never hesitate for one instant if the choice lies between them. For she

considers that eternity is greater than time and the soul of man of more

value than his body. The sacraments therefore, in her eyes, come before

an adequate tram-service; and that a man's soul should be in grace is,

to her, of more importance than that his body should be in health--if

the choice is between them. She prefers, therefore, the priest to the

doctor, if there is not time for both, and Holy Communion to a good

breakfast.

Therefore, of course, she appears too otherworldly to the stockbroker

and the provincial mayor, since she actually places the things of God

before the things of man and "seeks first His Kingdom."

(ii) "And all these things shall be added" to her. For she is Human

also, in that she dwells in this world where God has placed her, and

uses therefore the things with which He has surrounded her. To say that

she is supernatural is not to deny her humanity any more than to assert

that man has an immortal soul is to exclude the truth that he also has a

body. It is this Body of hers, then--this humanity of hers which

enshrines her Divinity--that claims and uses earthly things; it is this

Body that _dwells in houses made with hands_ and that claims too, in

honour to herself and her Bridegroom, that, so long as her spirituality

is not tarnished, these houses shall be as splendid as art can make

them. For she is not a Puritan nor a Manichee; she does not say that any

single thing which God has made can conceivably be of itself evil,

however grievously it may have been abused; on the contrary, she has His

own authority for saying that _all is very good_.

She uses, then, every earthly beauty that the world will yield to her,

to honour her own Majesty. It may be right to set diamonds round the

neck of a woman, but it is certainly right to set them round the Chalice

of the Blood of God. If an earthly king wears vestments of cloth of

gold, must not a heavenly King yet more wear them? If music is used by

the world to destroy men's souls, may not she use it to save their

souls? If a marble palace is fit for the President of the French

Republic, by what right do men withhold it from the King of kings?

But the world does withhold its wealth sometimes? Very well then, she

can serve God without it, in spite of her rights. If men whine and

cringe, or bully and shout, for the jewels with which their forefathers

honoured God, she will fling them back again down her altar stairs and

worship God in a barn or a catacomb without them. For, though she does

not _serve God and Mammon_, she yet _makes to herself friends of the

Mammon of iniquity_. Though she does not and never can serve God and

Mammon, she will and can, when the world permits it, make Mammon serve

her. For the Church is the Majesty of God dwelling on earth. She is

there, in herself, utterly independent of her reception. If it is _her

own_ to whom _she comes, and her own do not receive her_, they are none

the less hers by every right. For, though she will use every earthly

thing to her honour, though she considers no ointment wasted, however

precious, that is spilled by love over her feet, yet her essential glory

does not lie in these things. She is _all glorious within_, whether or

not her _vesture is of gold_, for she is a _King's Daughter_. She is,

essentially, as glorious in the Catacombs as in the Roman basilicas; as

lovely in the barefooted friar as in the robed and sceptred Vicar of

Christ; as majestic in Christ naked on the Cross as in Christ ascended

and enthroned in heaven.

Yet, since she is His Majesty on earth, she has a right to all that

earth can give. All _the beasts of the field are hers, and the cattle on

a thousand hills_, all the stars of heaven and the jewels of earth; all

the things in the world are hers by Divine right.

_All things are hers, for she is Christ's._ Yet, nevertheless, _she will

suffer the loss of all things_ sooner than lose Him.

III

SANCTITY AND SIN

_Holy, Holy, Holy!_--IS. VI. 3.

Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners_. I TIM. I. 15.

A very different pair of charges--and far more vital--than those more or

less economic accusations of worldliness and otherworldliness which we

have just considered, concern the standards of goodness preached by the

Church and her own alleged incapacity to live up to them. These may be

briefly summed up by saying that one-half the world considers the Church

too holy for human life, and the other half, not holy enough. We may

name these critics, respectively, the Pagan and the Puritan.

I. It is the Pagan who charges her with excessive Holiness.

"You Catholics," he tells us, "are far too hard on sin and not nearly

indulgent enough towards poor human nature. Let me take as an instance

the sins of the flesh. Now here is a set of desires implanted by God or

Nature (as you choose to name the Power behind life) for wise and

indeed essential purposes. These desires are probably the very fiercest

known to man and certainly the most alluring; and human nature is, as we

know, an extraordinarily inconsistent and vacillating thing. Now I am

aware that the abuse of these passions leads to disaster and that Nature

has her inexorable laws and penalties; but you Catholics add a new

horror to life by an absurd and irrational insistence on the offence

that this abuse causes before God. For not only do you fiercely denounce

the "acts of sin," as you name them, but you presume to go deeper still

to the very desire itself, as it would seem. You are unpractical and

cruel enough to say that the very thought of sin deliberately

entertained can cut off the soul that indulges in it from the favour of

God.

"Or, to go further, consider the impossible ideals which you hold up

with regard to matrimony. These ideals have a certain beauty of their

own to persons who can embrace them; they may perhaps be, to use a

Catholic phrase, Counsels of Perfection; but it is merely ludicrous to

insist upon them as rules of conduct for all mankind. Human Nature is

human nature. You cannot bind the many by the dreams of the few.

"Or, to take a wider view altogether, consider the general standards you

hold up to us in the lives of your saints. These saints appear to the

ordinary common-place man as simply not admirable at all. It does not

seem to us admirable that St. Aloysius should scarcely lift his eyes

from the ground, or that St. Teresa should shut herself up in a cell, or

that St. Francis should scourge himself with briers for fear of

committing sin. That kind of attitude is too fantastically fastidious

altogether. You Catholics seem to aim at a standard that is simply not

desirable; both your ends and your methods are equally inhuman and

equally unsuitable for the world we have to live in. True religion is

surely something far more sensible than this; true religion should not

strain and strive after the impossible, should not seek to improve human

nature by a process of mutilation. You have excellent aims in some

respects and excellent methods in others, but in supreme demands you go

beyond the mark altogether. We Pagans neither agree with your morality

nor admire those whom you claim as your successes. If you were less holy

and more natural, less idealistic and more practical, you would be of a

greater service to the world which you desire to help. Religion should

be a sturdy, virile growth; not the delicate hot-house blossom which you

make it."

The second charge comes from the Puritan. "Catholicism is not holy

enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ; for see how terribly easy she

is to those who outrage and _crucify Him afresh!_ Perhaps it may not be

true after all, as we used to think, that the Catholic priest actually

gives leave to his penitents to commit sin; but the extraordinary ease

with which absolution is given comes very nearly to the same thing. So

far from this Church having elevated the human race, she has actually

lowered its standards by her attitude towards those of her children who

disobey God's Laws.

"And consider what some of these children of hers have been! Are there

any criminals in history so monumental as Catholic criminals? Have any

men ever fallen so low as, let us say, the Borgia family of the Middle

Ages, as Gilles de Rais and a score of others, as men and women who were

perhaps in their faith 'good Catholics' enough, yet in their lives a

mere disgrace to humanity? Look at the Latin countries with their

passionate records of crime, at the sexual immorality of France or

Spain; the turbulence and thriftlessness of Ireland, the ignorant

brutality of Catholic England. Are there any other denominations of

Christendom that exhibit such deplorable specimens as the runaway nuns,

the apostate priests, the vicious Popes of Catholicism? How is it that

tales are told of the iniquities of Catholicism such as are told of no

other of the sects of Christendom? Allow for all the exaggeration you

like, all the prejudice of historians, all the spitefulness of enemies,

yet there surely remains sufficient Catholic criminality to show that at

the best the Church is no better than any other religious body, and at

the worst, infinitely worse. The Catholic Church, then, is not holy

enough to be the Church of Jesus Christ."

II. When we turn to the Gospels we find that these two charges are, as a

matter of fact, precisely among those which were brought against our

Divine Lord.

First, undoubtedly, He was hated for His Holiness. Who can doubt that

the terrific standard of morality which He preached--the Catholic

preaching of which also is one of the charges of the Pagan--was a

principal cause of His rejection. For it was He, after all, who first

proclaimed that the laws of God bind not only action but thought; it was

He who first pronounced that man to be a murderer and an adulterer who

in his heart willed these sins; it was He who summed up the standard of

Christianity as a standard of perfection, _Be you perfect, as your

Father in Heaven is perfect;_ who bade men aspire to be as good as God!

It was His Holiness, then, that first drew on Him the hostility of the

world--that radiant white-hot sanctity in which His Sacred Humanity went

clothed. _Which of you convinceth me of sin?... Let him that is without

sin amongst you cast the first stone at her!_ These were words that

pierced the smooth formalism of the Scribe and the Pharisee and awoke an

undying hatred. It was this, surely, that led up irresistibly to the

final rejection of Him at the bar of Pilate and the choice of Barabbas

in His place. "_Not this man!_ not this piece of stainless Perfection!

Not this Sanctity that reveals all hearts, _but Barabbas_, that

comfortable sinner so like ourselves! This robber in whose company we

feel at ease! This murderer whose life, at any rate, is in no

reproachful contrast to our own!" Jesus Christ was found too holy for

the world.

But He was found, too, not holy enough. And it is this explicit charge

that is brought against Him again and again. It was dreadful to those

keepers of the Law that this Preacher of Righteousness should sit with

publicans and sinners; that this Prophet should allow such a woman as

Magdalen to touch Him. If this man were indeed a Prophet, He could not

bear the contact of sinners; if He were indeed zealous for God's

Kingdom, He could not suffer the presence of so many who were its

enemies. Yet He sits there at Zacchaeus' table, silent and smiling,

instead of crying on the roof to fall in; He calls Matthew from the

tax-office instead of blasting him and it together; He handles the leper

whom God's own Law pronounces unclean.

III. These, then, are the charges brought against the disciples of

Christ, as against the Master, and it is undeniable that there is truth

in them both.

It is true that the Catholic Church preaches a morality that is utterly

beyond the reach of human nature left to itself; that her standards are

standards of perfection, and that she prefers even the lowest rung of

the supernatural ladder to the highest rung of the natural.

And it is also true, without doubt, that the fallen or the unfaithful

Catholic is an infinitely more degraded member of humanity than the

fallen Pagan or Protestant; that the monumental criminals of history are

Catholic criminals, and that the monsters of the world--Henry VIII for

example, sacrilegious, murderer, and adulterer; Martin Luther, whose

printed table-talk is unfit for any respectable house; Queen Elizabeth,

perjurer, tyrant, and unchaste--were persons who had had all that the

Catholic Church could give them: the standards of her teaching, the

guidance of her discipline, and the grace of her sacraments. What, then,

is the reconciliation of this Paradox?

(1) First the Catholic Church is Divine. She dwells, that is to say, in

heavenly places; she looks always upon the Face of God; she holds

enshrined in her heart the Sacred Humanity of Jesus Christ and the

stainless perfection of that Immaculate Mother from whom that Humanity

was drawn. How is it conceivable, then, that she should be content with

any standard short of perfection? If she were a Society evolved from

below--a merely human Society that is to say--she could never advance

beyond those standards to which in the past her noblest children have

climbed. But since there dwells in her the Supernatural--since Mary was

endowed from on high with a gift to which no human being could ascend,

since the Sun of Justice Himself came down from the heavens to lead a

human life under human terms--how can she ever again be content with

anything short of that height from which these came?

(2) But she is also human, dwelling herself in the midst of humanity,

placed here in the world for the express object of gathering into

herself and of sanctifying by her graces that very world which has

fallen from God. These outcasts and these sinners are the very material

on which she has to work; these waste products of human life, these

marred types and specimens of humanity have no hope at all except in

her.

For, first, she desires if she can--and she has often been

able--actually to raise these, first to sanctity and then to her own

altars; it is for her and her only to _raise the poor from the dunghill

and to set them with the princes_. She sets before the Magdalen and the

thief, then, nothing less but her own standard of perfection.

Yet though in one sense she is satisfied with nothing lower than this,

in another sense she is satisfied with almost infinitely nothing. If she

can but bring the sinner within the very edge of grace; if she can but

draw from the dying murderer one cry of contrition; if she can but turn

his eyes with one look of love to the crucifix, her labours are a

thousand times repaid; for, if she has not brought him to the head of

sanctity, she has at least brought him to its foot and set him there

beneath that ladder of the supernatural which reaches from hell to

heaven.

For she alone has this power. She alone is so utterly confident in the

presence of the sinner because she alone has the secret of his cure.

There in her confessional is the Blood of Christ that can make his soul

clean again, and in her Tabernacle the Body of Christ that will be his

food of eternal life. She alone dares be his friend because she alone

can be his Saviour. If, then, her saints are one sign of her identity,

no less are her sinners another.

For not only is she the Majesty of God dwelling on earth, she is also

His Love; and therefore its limitations, and they only, are hers. That

Sun of mercy that shines and that Rain of charity that streams, _on just

and unjust alike_, are the very Sun and Rain that give her life. If I

_go up to Heaven she is there_, enthroned in Christ, on the Right Hand

of God;_ if I go down to Hell she is there also_, drawing back souls

from the brink from which she alone can rescue them. For she is that

very ladder which Jacob saw so long ago, that staircase planted here in

the blood and the slime of earth, rising there into the stainless Light

of the Lamb. Holiness and unholiness are both alike hers and she is

ashamed of neither--the holiness of her own Divinity which is Christ's

and the unholiness of those outcast members of her Humanity to whom she

ministers.

By her power, then, which again is Christ's, the Magdalen becomes the

Penitent; the thief the first of the redeemed; and Peter, the yielding

sand of humanity, the _Rock on which Herself is built_.

IV

JOY AND SORROW

_Rejoice and be exceeding glad.... Blessed are they that mourn_.--

MATT. V. 12, 5.

The Catholic Church, as has been seen, is always too "extreme" for the

world. She is content with nothing but a Divine Peace, and in its cause

is the occasion of bloodier wars than any waged from merely human

motives. She is not content with mere goodness, but urges always

Sanctity upon her children; yet simultaneously tolerates sinners whom

even the world casts out. Let us consider now how, in fulfilling these

two apparently mutually contradictory precepts of our Lord, to rejoice

and to mourn, once more she appears to the world extravagant in both

directions at once.

I. It is a common charge against her that she rejoices too exceedingly;

is arrogant, confident, and optimistic where she ought to be quiet,

subdued, and tender.

"This world," exclaims her critic, "is on the whole a very sad and

uncertain place. There is no silver lining that has not a cloud before

it; there is no hope that may not, after all, be disappointed. Any

religion, then, that claims to be adequate to human nature must always

have something of sadness and even hesitancy about it. Religion must

walk softly all her days if she is to walk hand in hand with experience.

Death is certain; is life as certain? The function of religion, then, is

certainly to help to lighten this darkness, yet not by too great a blaze

of light. She may hope and aspire and guess and hint; in fact, that is

her duty. But she must not proclaim and denounce and command. She must

be suggestive rather than exhaustive; tender rather than virile; hopeful

rather than positive; experimental rather than dogmatic.

"Now Catholicism is too noisy and confident altogether. See a Catholic

liturgical function on some high day! Was there ever anything more

arrogant? What has this blaze of colour, this shouting of voices, this

blowing of trumpets to do with the soft half-lights of the world and the

mystery of the darkness from which we came and to which we return? What

has this clearcut dogma to do with the gentle guesses of philosophy,

this optimism with the uncertainty of life and the future--above all,

what sympathy has this preposterous exultation with the misery of the

world?

"And how unlike, too, all this is to the spirit of the Man of Sorrows!

We read that _Jesus wept_, but never that He laughed. His was a sad

life, from the dark stable of Bethlehem to the darker hill of Calvary.

He was what He was because He knew what sorrow meant; it was in His

sorrows that He has touched the heart of humanity. '_Blessed_,' he says,

'_are those that mourn_.' Blessed are they that expect nothing, for they

shall not be disappointed."

In another mood, however, our critic will find fault with our sadness.

"Why is not the religion of you Catholics more in accord with the happy

world in which we live? Surely the supreme function of religion is to

hearten and encourage and lay stress on the bright side of life! It

should be brief, bright, and brotherly. For, after all, this is a lovely

world and full of gaiety. It is true that it has its shadows, yet there

can be no shadows without a sun; there is death, but see how life

continually springs again from the grave. Since all things, therefore,

work together for good; since God has taken pains to make the world so

sweet, it is but a poor compliment to the Creator to treat it as a vale

of misery. Let us, then, make the best of things and forget the worst.

Let us leave the things that are behind and press forward to the things

that are before. Let us insist that the world is white with a few black

spots upon it, be optimistic, happy, and confident.

"You Catholics, however, are but a poor-spirited, miserable race. While

other denominations are, little by little, eliminating melancholy, you

are insisting upon it. While the rest of us are agreeing that Hell is

but a bogy, and sin a mistake, and suffering no more than remedial, you

Catholics are still insisting upon their reality--that Hell is eternal,

that sin is the deliberate opposition of the human will to the Divine,

and that suffering therefore is judicial. Sin, Penance, Sacrifice,

Purgatory, and Hell--these are the old nightmares of dogma; and their

fruits are tears, pain, and terror. What is wrong with Catholicism,

then, is its gloom and its sorrow; for this is surely not the

Christianity of Christ as we are now learning to understand it. Christ,

rightly understood, is the Man of joy, not of Grief. He is more

characteristic of Himself, so to speak, as the smiling shepherd of

Galilee, surrounded by His sheep; as the lover of children and flowers

and birds; as the Preacher of Life and Resurrection--He is more

characteristic of Himself as crowned, ascended, and glorified, than as

the blood-stained martyr of the Cross whom you set above your altars.

_Rejoice, then, and be exceeding glad_, and you will please Him best."

Once more, then, we appear to be in the wrong, to whatever side we turn.

The happy red-faced monk with his barrel of beer is a caricature of our

joy. Can this, it is asked, be a follower of the Man of Sorrows? And the

long-faced ascetic with his eyes turned up to heaven is the world's

conception of our sorrow. Catholic joy and Catholic sorrow are alike too

ardent and extreme for a world that delights in moderation in both

sorrow and joy--a little melancholy, but not too much; a little

cheerfulness, but not excessive.

II. First, then, it is interesting to remember that these charges are

not now being made against us for the first time. In the days even of

the Roman Empire they were thought to be signs of Christian inhumanity.

"These Christians," it was said, "must surely be bewitched. See how

they laugh at the rack and the whip and go to the arena as to a bridal

bed! See how Lawrence jests upon his gridiron." And yet again, "They

must be bewitched, because of their morbidity and their love of

darkness, the enemies of joy and human mirth and common pleasure. In

either case they are not true men at all." Their extravagance of joy

when others would be weeping, and their extravagance of sorrow when all

the world is glad--these are the very signs to which their enemies

appealed as proofs that a power other than that of this world was

inspiring them, as proofs that they could not be the simple friends of

the human race that they dared to pretend.

It is even more interesting to remember that our Divine Lord Himself

calls attention to these charges. "_The Son of Man comes eating and

drinking._ The Son of Man sits at the wedding feast at Cana and at meat

in the rich man's house and you say, _Behold a glutton and a

winebibber!_ The Son of Man comes rejoicing and you bid Him to be sad.

And _John the Baptist came neither eating nor drinking._ John the

Baptist comes from the desert, an ascetic with his camel-hair about him

and words of penance and wrath in his mouth, and you say, _He hath a

devil.... We have piped unto you and you have not danced_. We have

played at weddings like children in a market-place, and you have told us

to be quiet and think about our sins. _We have mourned unto_ you, we

have asked you to play at funerals instead, and you have told us that it

was morbid to think about death. _We have mourned and you would not

lament._"

III. The fact is, of course, that both joy and sorrow must be an element

in all religion, since joy and sorrow together make up experience. The

world is neither white with black spots nor black with white spots; it

is black and white. It is quite as true that autumn follows summer as

that spring follows winter. It is no less true that life arises out of

death than that death follows life.

Religion then cannot, if it is to be adequate to experience, be a

passionless thing. On the contrary it must be passionate, since human

nature is passionate too; and it must be a great deal more passionate.

It must not moderate grief, but deepen it; not banish joy, but exalt it.

It must weep--and bitterer tears than any that the world can shed--with

them that weep; and rejoice too--with _a joy which no man can take

away_--with them that rejoice. It must sink deeper and rise higher, it

must feel more acutely, it must agonize and triumph more abundantly, if

it truly comes from God and is to minister to men, since His thoughts

are higher than ours and His Love more burning.

For so did Christ live on earth. At one hour He _rejoiced greatly in

spirit_ so that those that watched Him were astonished; at another He

sweated blood for anguish. In one hour He is exalted high on the blazing

Mount of Transfiguration; in another He is plunged deeper than any human

heart can fathom in the low-lying garden of Gethsemane. _Behold and see

if there be any sorrow like to My Sorrow._

III. For, again, the Church, like her Lord, is both Divine and Human.

She is Divine and therefore she rejoices--so filled with the New Wine of

the Kingdom of her Father that men stare at her in contempt.

It is true enough that the world is unhappy; that hearts are broken;

that families, countries, and centuries are laid waste by sin. Yet since

the Church is Divine, she knows, not merely guesses or hopes or desires,

but _knows_, that _although all things come to an end, God's commandment

is exceeding broad_. Years ago, she knows--and therefore not all the

criticism in the world can shake her--that her Lord came down from

heaven, was born, died, rose, and ascended, and that He reigns in

unconquerable power. She knows that He will return again and take the

kingdom and reign; she knows, because she is Divine, that in every

tabernacle of hers on earth the Lord of joy lies hidden; that Mary

intercedes; that the saints are with God; that _the Blood of Jesus

Christ cleanseth from all sin_. Look round her earthly buildings, then,

and there are the symbols and images of these things. There is the merry

light before her altar; there are the saints stiff with gold and gems;

there is Mary, "Cause of our Joy," radiant, with her radiant Child in

her arms. If she were but human, she would dare but to shadow these

things forth--shadows of her own desires; she would whisper her creed;

murmur her prayers; darken her windows. But she is Divine and has

herself come down from heaven; so she does not guess, or think, or

hope--she knows.

But she is human too and dwells in the midst of a human race that does

not know and therefore will not wholly take her at her word, and the

very height of her exaltation must also be, then, the measure of her

despair. The fact that she knows so certainly intensifies a thousandfold

her human sorrow, as she, who has _come that they may have life_, sees

how _they will not come_ to her and find it, as she sees how long the

triumph which is certain is yet delayed through their faithlessness. "If

_thou hadst known_," she cries in the heart-broken words of Jesus

Himself over Jerusalem, "_if thou hadst but known the things that belong

to thy peace! Behold and see, then, if there be any sorrow like to

mine_, if there be any grief so profound and so piercing as mine, who

hold the Keys of Heaven and watch men turn away from the Door."

So, then, in church after church stand symbolic groups of statuary,

representing joy and tragedy, compared with which Venus and Adonis are

but childish and half-civilized images--Mary as triumphant Queen, with

the gold-crowned Child in her arms, and Mary the tormented Mother, with

her dead Son across her knees. For she who is both Divine and Human

alone understands what it is that Humanity has done to Divinity.

Is it any wonder, then, that the world thinks her extravagant in both

directions at once; that the world turns away on Good Friday from the

unutterable depths of her sorrow, and on Easter Day from the unscalable

heights of her joy, calling the one morbid and the other hysterical? For

what does the world know of such passions as these? What, after all, can

the sensualist know of joy, or the ruined financier of sorrow? And what

can the moderate, self-controlled, self-respecting man of the world know

of either?

Lastly, then, in the Paradox of Love, the Church holds both these

passions, at full blast, both at once. As human love turns joy into pain

and suffers in the midst of ecstasy, so Divine Love turns pain into joy

and exults and reigns upon the Cross. For the Church is more than the

Majesty of God reigning on earth, more than the passionless love of the

Eternal; she is the Very Sacred Heart of Christ Himself, the Eternal

united with Man, and both suffering and rejoicing through that union. It

is His bliss which she at once experiences and extends, in virtue of her

identity with Him; and in the midst of a fallen world it is the

supremest bliss of that Sacred Heart to suffer pain.

V

LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF MAN

_Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy

neighbour as thyself_.--LUKE x. 27.

We have already considered two charges brought against Catholicism from

opposite quarters; namely, that we are too worldly and too otherworldly,

too much busied with temporal concerns to be truly spiritual, and too

metaphysical and remote and dogmatic to be truly practical. Let us go on

to consider these same two charges produced, so to speak, a little

further into a more definitely spiritual plane; charges that now accuse

us of too great activities in our ministry to men and too many

attentions paid to God.

I. (i) It is a very common complaint against Catholics, laymen as well

as clergy, that they are overzealous in their attempts to proselytize.

True and spiritual religion, we are told, is as intimate and personal an

affair as the love between husband and wife; it is essentially private

and individual. "The religion of all sensible men," it has been said,

"is precisely that which they always keep to themselves." Tolerance,

therefore, is a mark of spirituality, for if I am truly religious I

shall have as much respect for the religion of my neighbour as for my

own. I shall no more seek to interfere in his relations with God than I

shall allow him to interfere with mine.

Now Catholics are notoriously intolerant. It is not merely that there

are intolerant Catholics, for intolerance is of course to be found in

all narrow-minded persons, but it is Catholic principles themselves that

are intolerant; and every Catholic who lives up to them is bound to be

so also. And we can see this illustrated every day.

First, there is the matter of Catholic missions to the heathen. There

are no missionaries, we are told, so untiring and so devoted as those of

the Church. Their zeal, of course, is a proof of their sincerity; but it

is also a proof of their intolerance: for why, after all, cannot they

leave the heathen alone, since religion is, in its essence, a private

and individual matter? Beautiful pictures, accordingly, are suggested to

us of the domestic peace and happiness reigning amongst the tribes of

Central Africa until the arrival of the Preaching Friar with his

destructive dogmas. We are bidden to observe the high doctrines and the

ascetic life of the Brahmin, the significant symbolism of the Hindu, and

the philosophical attitudes of the Confucian. All these various

relationships to God are, we are informed, entirely the private affairs

of those who live by them; and if Catholics were truly spiritual they

would understand that this was so and not seek to supplant by a system

which is now, at any rate, become an essentially European way of looking

at things, these ancient creeds and philosophies that are far better

suited to the Oriental temperament.

But the matter is worse, even, than this. It may conceivably be argued,

says the modern man of the world, that after all those Oriental

religions have not developed such virtues and graces as has

Christianity. It may perhaps be argued that in time the religion of the

West, if missionaries will persevere, will raise the Hindu higher than

his own obscenities have succeeded in doing, and that the civilization

produced by Christianity is actually of a higher type, in spite of its

evil by-products, than that of the head-hunters of Borneo and the bloody

savages of Africa. But at any rate there is no excuse whatever for the

intolerant Catholic proselytizer in English homes. For, roughly

speaking, it is only the Catholic whom you cannot trust in your own home

circle; sooner or later you will find him, if he at all lives up to his

principles, insinuating the praises of his own faith and the weaknesses

of your own; your sons and daughters he considers to be fair game; he

thinks nothing of your domestic peace in comparison with the propagation

of his own tenets. He is characterized, first and last, by that dogmatic

and intolerant spirit that is the exact contrary of all that the modern

world deems to be the spirit of true Christianity. True Christianity,

then, as has been said, is essentially a private, personal, and

individual matter between each soul and her God.

(ii) The second charge brought against Catholics is that they make

religion far too personal, too private, and too intimate for it to be

considered the religion of Jesus Christ. And this is illustrated by the

supreme value which the Church places upon what is known as the

Contemplative Life.

For if there is one element in Catholicism that the man-in-the-street

especially selects for reprobation it is the life of the Enclosed

Religious. It is supposed to be selfish, morbid, introspective, unreal;

it is set in violent dramatic contrast with the ministerial Life of

Jesus Christ. A quantity of familiar eloquence is solemnly poured out

upon it as if nothing of the kind had ever been said before: it is said

that "a man cannot get away from the world by shutting himself up in a

monastery"; that "a man should not think about his own soul so much, but

rather of what good he can do in the world in which God has placed him";

that "four whitewashed walls" are not the proper environment for a

philanthropic Christian.

And yet, after all, what is the Contemplative Life except precisely that

which the world just now recommended? And could religion possibly be

made a more intimate, private, and personal matter between the soul and

God than the Carthusian or Carmelite makes it?

The fact is, of course, that Catholics are wrong whatever they do--too

extreme in everything which they undertake. They are too active and not

retired enough in their proselytism; too retired and not active enough

in their Contemplation.

II. Now the Life of our Divine Lord exhibits, of course, both the Active

and the Contemplative elements that have always distinguished the Life

of His Church.

For three years He set Himself to the work of preaching His Revelation

and establishing the Church that was to be its organ through all the

centuries. He went about, therefore, freely and swiftly, now in town,

now in country. He laid down His Divine principles and presented His

Divine credentials, at marriage feasts, in market-places, in country

roads, in crowded streets, and in private houses. He wrought the works

of mercy, spiritual and corporal, that were to be the types of all works

of mercy ever afterwards. He gave spiritual and ascetic teaching on the

Mount of Beatitudes, dogmatic instructions in Capharnaum and the

wilderness to the east of Galilee, and mystical discourses in the Upper

Chamber of Jerusalem and the temple courts. His activities and His

proselytisms were unbounded. He broke up domestic circles and the

routine of offices. He called the young man from his estates and Matthew

from custom-house and James and John from their father's fishing

business. He made a final demonstration of His unlimited claim on

humanity in His Procession on Palm Sunday, and on Ascension Day

ratified and commissioned the proselytizing activities of His Church for

ever in His tremendous charge to the Apostolic band. _Going, therefore,

teach ye all nations ... teaching them to observe all things whatsoever

I have commanded you; and behold I am with you all the days, even to the

consummation of the world._

Yet this, it must be remembered, was not only not the whole of His Life

on earth, it was not even a very considerable part of it, if reckoned by

years. For three years He was active, but for thirty He was retired in

the house of Nazareth; and even those three years are again and again

broken by retirement. He is now in the wilderness for forty days, now on

the mountain all night in prayer, now bidding His disciples come apart

and rest themselves. The very climax of His ministry too was wrought in

silence and solitude. He removed Himself _about a stone's throw_ in the

garden of Gethsemane from those who loved Him best; He broke His silence

on the Cross to bid farewell even to His holy Mother herself. Above all,

he explicitly and emphatically commended the Life of Contemplative

Prayer as the highest that can be lived on earth, telling Martha that

activity, even in the most necessary duties, was not after all the best

use to which time and love could be put, but rather that _Mary had

chosen the best part ... the one thing that is necessary_, and that it

_shall not be taken away from her_ even by a sister's loving zeal.

Finally, fault was found with Jesus Christ, as with His Church, on

precisely these two points. When He was living the life of retirement in

the country He was rebuked that He did not go up to the feast and state

His claims plainly--justify, that is, by activity, His pretensions to

the Messiahship; and when He did so, He was entreated to bid his

acclaimants _to hold their peace_--to justify, that is, by humility and

retirement, His pretensions to spirituality.

III. The reconciliation, therefore, of these two elements in the

Catholic system is very easy to find.

(i) First, it is the Church's Divinity that accounts for her passion for

God. To her as to none else on earth is the very face of God revealed as

the Absolute and Final Beauty that lies beyond the limits of all

Creation. She in her Divinity enjoys it may be said, even in her sojourn

on earth, that very Beatific Vision that enraptured always the Sacred

Humanity of Jesus Christ. With all the company of heaven then, with Mary

Immaculate, with the Seraphim and with the glorified saints of God, she

_endures, seeing Him Who is invisible_. Even while the eyes of her

humanity are held, while her human members _walk by faith and not by

sight_, she, in her Divinity, which is the guaranteed Presence of Jesus

Christ in her midst, already _dwells in heavenly places_ and is already

_come to Mount Zion and the City of the living God and to God Himself_,

Who is the Light in which all fair things are seen to be fair.

Is it any wonder then that, now and again, some chosen child of hers

catches a mirrored glimpse of what she herself beholds with unveiled

face; that some Catholic soul, now and again, chosen and called by God

to this amazing privilege, should suddenly perceive, as never before,

that God is the one and only Absolute Beauty, and that, compared with

the contemplation of this Beauty--which contemplation is, after all, the

final life of Eternity to which every redeemed soul shall come--all the

activities of earthly life are nothing; and that, in her passion for

this adorable God, she should run into a secret room and _shut the door

and pray to her Father Who is in secret_, and so remain praying, a

hidden channel of life to the whole of that Body of which she is a

member, an intercessor for the whole of that Society of which she is one

unit? There in silence, then, she sits at Jesus' feet and listens to the

Voice which is _as the sound of many waters_; in the whiteness of her

cell watches Him Whose _Face is as a Flame of Fire_, and in austerity

and fasting _tastes and finds that the Lord is gracious._

Of course this is but madness and folly to those who know God only in

His Creation, who imagine Him merely as the Soul of the World and the

Vitality of Created Life. To such as these earth is His highest Heaven

and the beauty of the world the noblest vision that can be conceived.

Yet to that soul that is Catholic, who understands that the Eternal

Throne is indeed above the stars and that the Transcendence of God is as

fully a truth as His Immanence--that God in Himself, apart from all

that He has made, is all-fair and all-sufficient in His own Beauty--to

such a soul as this, if called to such a life, there is no need that the

Church should declare explicitly that the Contemplative Life is the

highest. She knows it already.

(ii) The _First Great Commandment_ of the Law, then, is inevitably

followed by the Second, and the Catholic interpretation of the Second is

thought by the world, which understands neither, to be as extravagant as

her interpretation of the First.

For this Divine Church that knows God is also a Human Society that

dwells among men, and since she in herself unites Divinity and Humanity,

she cannot rest until she has united them everywhere else.

For, as she turns her eyes from God to men, she sees there immortal

souls, made in the image of God and made for Him and Him alone, seeking

to satisfy themselves with Creation instead of with the Creator. She

hears how the world preaches the sanctity of the temperament, and the

holiness of the individual point of view, as if there were no

Transcendent God at all and no objective external Revelation ever made

by Him. She sees how men, instead of seeking to conform themselves to

God's Revelation of Himself, attempt rather to conform such fragments of

that Revelation as have reached them to their own points of view; she

listens to talk about "aspects of truth" and "schools of thought" and

the "values of experience" as if God had never spoken either in the

thunders of Sinai or the still voice of Galilee.

Is it any wonder, then, that her Proselytism appears to such a world as

extravagant as her Contemplation, her passion for men as unreasonable as

her passion for God, when that world sees her bring herself from her

cloisters and her secret places to proclaim as with a trumpet those

demands of God which He has made known, those Laws which He has

promulgated, and those rewards which He has promised? For how can she do

otherwise who has looked on the all-glorious Face of God and then on the

vacant and complacent faces of men--she who knows God's infinite

capacity for satisfying men and men's all but infinite incapacity for

seeking God--when she sees some poor soul shutting herself up indeed

within the deadly and chilly walls of her own "temperament" and

"individual point of view," when earth and heaven and the Lord of them

both is waiting for her outside?

The Church, then, is too much interested in men and too much absorbed in

God. Of course she is too much interested and too much absorbed, for she

alone knows the value and capacity of both; she who is herself both

Divine and Human. For Religion, to her, is not an elegant accomplishment

or a graceful philosophy or a pleasing scheme of conjectures. It is the

fiery bond between God and man, neither of whom can be satisfied

without the other, the One in virtue of His Love and the other in virtue

of his createdness. She alone, then, understands and reconciles the

tremendous Paradox of the Law that is Old as well as New. _Thou shalt

love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart ... and thy neighbour as

thyself _.

VI

FAITH AND REASON

_Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall

not enter into it_.--MARK X. 15.

_Some things hard to be understood, which the unlearned and the unstable

wrest, as also the other Scriptures, to their own perdition_.--

II PET. III. 16.

There are two great gifts, or faculties, by which men attain to truth:

faith and reason. From these two sides, therefore, come two more

assaults upon the Catholic position, a position which itself faces in

both these directions. On the one side we are told that we believe too

simply, on the other that we do not believe simply enough; on the one

side that we reason too little, on the other that we do not reason

enough. Let us set out these attacks in order.

I. (i) "You Catholics," says one critic, "are far too credulous in

matters of religion. You believe, not as reasonable men believe, because

you have verified or experienced the truths you profess, but simply

because these dogmas are presented to you by the Church. If reason and

common-sense are gifts of God and intended for use, surely it is very

strange to silence them in your search for the supreme truth. Faith, of

course, has its place, but it must not be blind faith. Reason must test,

verify, and interpret, or faith is mere credulity.

"Consider, for example, the words of Christ, _This is My Body_. Now the

words as they stand may certainly be supposed to mean what you say they

mean; yet, interpreted by Reason, they cannot possibly mean anything of

the kind. Did not Christ Himself sit in bodily form at the table as He

spoke them? How then could He hold Himself in His hand? Did He not speak

in metaphors and images continually? Did He not call Himself _a Door and

a Vine_? Using Reason, then, to interpret these words, it is evident

that He meant no more than that He was instituting a memorial feast, in

which the bread should symbolize His Body and the wine His Blood. So too

with many other distinctively Catholic doctrines--with the Petrine

claims, with the authority 'to bind and loose,' and the rest. Catholic

belief on these points exhibits not faith properly so-called--that is,

Faith tested by Reason--but mere credulity. God gave us all Reason! Then

in His Name let us use it!"

(ii) From the other side comes precisely the opposite charge.

"You Catholics," cries the other critic, "are far too argumentative and

deductive and logical in your Faith. True Religion is a very simple

thing; it is the attitude of a child who trusts and does not question.

But with you Catholics Religion has degenerated into Theology. Jesus

Christ did not write a _Summa_; He made a few plain statements which

comprise, as they stand, the whole Christian Religion; they are full of

mystery, no doubt, but it is He who left them mysterious. Why, then,

should your theologians seek to penetrate into regions which He did not

reveal and to elaborate what He left unelaborated?

"Take, for example, Christ's words, _This is My Body_. Now of course

these words are mysterious, and if Christ had meant that they should be

otherwise, He would Himself have given the necessary comment upon them.

Yet He did not; He left them in an awful and deep simplicity into which

no human logic ought even to seek to penetrate. Yet see the vast and

complicated theology that the traditions have either piled upon them or

attempted to extract out of them; the philosophical theories by which it

has been sought to elucidate them; the intricate and wide-reaching

devotions that have been founded upon them! What have words like

'Transubstantiation' and 'Concomitance,' devotions like 'Benediction,'

gatherings like Eucharistic Congresses to do with the august simplicity

of Christ's own institution? You Catholics argue too much--deduce,

syllogize, and explain--until the simple splendour of Christ's

mysterious act is altogether overlaid and hidden. Be more simple! It is

better to _'love God than to discourse learnedly about the Blessed

Trinity.' It has not pleased God to save His people through dialectics._

Believe more, argue less!"

Once more, then, the double charge is brought. We believe, it seems,

where we ought to reason. We reason where we ought to believe. We

believe too blindly and not blindly enough. We reason too closely and

not closely enough.

Here, then, is a vast subject--the relations of Faith and Reason and the

place of each in man's attitude towards Truth. It is, of course,

possible only to glance at these things in outline.

II. First, let us consider, as a kind of illustration, the relations of

these things in ordinary human science. Neither Faith nor Reason will,

of course, be precisely the same as in supernatural matters; yet there

will be a sufficient parallel for our purpose.

A scientist, let us say, proposes to make observations upon the

structure of a fly's leg. He catches his fly, dissects, prepares, places

it in his microscope, observes, and records. Now here, it would seem, is

Pure Science at its purest and Reason in its most reasonable aspect. Yet

the acts of faith in this very simple process are, if we consider

closely, simply numberless. The scientist must make acts of faith,

certainly reasonable acts, yet none the less of faith, for all that:

first, that his fly is not a freak of nature; next, that his lens is

symmetrically ground; then that his observation is adequate; then that

his memory has not played him false between his observing and his

recording that which he has seen. These acts are so reasonable that we

forget that they are acts of faith. They are justified by reason before

they are made, and they are usually, though not invariably, verified by

Reason afterwards. Yet they are, in their essence, Faith and not Reason.

So, too, when a child learns a foreign language. Reason justifies him in

making one act of faith that his teacher is competent, another that his

grammar is correct, a third that he hears and sees and understands

correctly the information given him, a fourth that such a language

actually exists. And when he visits France afterwards he can, within

limits, again verify by his reason the acts of faith which he has

previously made. Yet none the less they were acts of faith, though they

were reasonable. In a word, then, no acquirement of or progress in any

branch of human knowledge is possible without the exercise of faith. I

cannot walk downstairs in the dark without at least as many acts of

faith as there are steps in the staircase. Society could not hold

together another day if mutual faith were wholly wanting among its

units. Certainly we use reason first to justify our faith, and we reason

later to verify it. Yet none the less the middle step is faith. Columbus

reasoned first that there must be a land beyond the Atlantic, and he

used that same reason later to verify his discovery. Yet without a

sublime act of faith between these processes, without that almost

reckless moment in which he first weighed anchor from Europe, reason

would never have gone beyond speculative theorizing. Faith made real for

him what Reason suggested. Faith actually accomplished that of which

Reason could only dream.

III. Turn now to the coming of Jesus Christ on earth. He came, as we

know now, a Divine Teacher from heaven to make a Revelation from God; He

came, that is, to demand from men a sublime Act of Faith in Himself. For

He Himself was Incarnate Wisdom, and He demanded, therefore, as none

else can demand it, a supreme acceptance of His claim. No progress in

Divine knowledge, as He Himself tells us, is possible, then, without

this initial act. _Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a

little child shall not enter into it_. Every soul that is to receive

this teaching in its entirety must first accept the Teacher and sit at

His feet.

Yet He did not make this claim merely on His own unsupported word. He

presented His credentials, so to say; He fulfilled prophecy; He wrought

miracles; He satisfied the moral sense. _Believe Me_, He says, _for the

very works' sake_. Before, then, demanding the fundamental act of Faith

on which the reception of Revelation must depend, He took pains to make

this Act of Faith reasonable. "You see what I do," He said in effect,

"you have observed My life, My words, My actions. Now is it not in

accordance with Reason that you should grant My claims? Can you explain

away, _reasonably_, on any other grounds than those which I state, the

phenomena of My life?"

Certainly, then, He appealed to Reason; He appealed to Private Judgment,

since that, up to that moment, was all that His hearers possessed. But,

in demanding an Act of Faith, He appealed to Private Judgment to set

itself aside; He appealed to Reason as to whether it were not Reasonable

to stand aside for the moment and let Faith take its place. And we know

how His disciples responded. _Whom do you say that I am?... Thou art the

Christ, the Son of the Living God._

At that instant, then, a new stage was begun. They had used their Reason

and their Private Judgment, and, aided by His grace, had concluded that

the next reasonable step was that of Faith. Up to that point they had

observed, dissected, criticized, and analyzed His words; they had

examined, that is, His credentials. And now it was Reason itself that

urged them towards Faith, Reason that abdicated what had hitherto been,

its right and its duty, that Faith might assume her proper place.

Henceforth, then, their attitude must be a different one. Up to now they

had used their Reason to examine His claim; now it was Faith, aided and

urged by Reason, which accepted it.

Yet even now Reason's work is not done, though its scope in future is

changed. Reason no longer examines whether He be God; Faith has

accepted it: yet Reason has to be as active as ever; for Reason now must

begin with all its might the task of understanding His Revelation. Faith

has given them, so to speak, casket after casket of jewels; every word

that Jesus Christ henceforth speaks to them is a very mine of treasure,

absolutely true since He is known to be a Divine Teacher Who has given

it. And Reason now begins her new work, not of justifying Faith, but, so

to say, of interpreting it; not of examining His claims, since these

have been once for all accepted, but of examining, understanding, and

assimilating all that He reveals.

III. Turn now to Catholicism.

It is the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church only, that acts as

did Jesus Christ and offers an adequate object to Reason and Faith

alike. For, first, it is evident that if Christ intended His Revelation

to last through all time, He must have designed a means by which it

should last, an Authority that should declare and preserve it as He

Himself delivered it. And next, it is evident that since the Catholic

Church alone even claims that prerogative, clearly and coherently, her

right to represent that Authority is in proportion to the clearness and

coherence of her claim. Or, again, she advances in support of that claim

precisely those same credentials as did He: she points to her miracles,

her achievements, the fulfilment of prophecy, the unity of her teaching,

the appeal to men's moral sense--all of them appeals to Reason, and

appeals which lead up, as did His, to the supreme claim, which He also

made, to demand an Act of Faith in herself as a Divine Teacher.

For she alone demands it. Other denominations of Christendom point to a

Book, or to the writings of Fathers, or to the example of their members,

and she too does these things. But it is she alone who appeals to these

things not as final in themselves, not as constituting in themselves a

final court of appeal, but as indicating as that court of appeal her own

Living Voice. _Believe me, for the works' sake_, she too says. "Use your

reason to the full to examine my credentials; study prophecy, history,

the Fathers--study my claims in any realm in which your intellect is

competent--and then see if it is not after all supremely reasonable for

Reason to abdicate that particular throne on which she has sat so long

and to seat Faith there instead? Certainly follow your Reason and use

your private judgment, for at present you have no other guide; and then,

please God, aided by Faith, Reason will itself bow before Faith, and

take her own place henceforth, not on the throne, but on the steps that

lead to it."

Is Reason, then, to be silent henceforth? Why, the whole of theology

gives the answer. Did Newman cease to think when he became a Catholic?

Did Thomas Aquinas resign his intellect when he devoted himself to

study? Not for one instant is Reason silent. On the contrary, she is

active as never before. Certainly she is no longer occupied in

examining as to whether the Church is divine, but instead she is busied,

with incredible labours, in examining what follows from that fact, in

sorting the new treasures that are opened to her with the dawn of

Revelation upon her eyes, in arranging, deducting, and understanding the

details and structure of the astonishing Vision of Truth. And more, she

is as inviolate as ever. For never can there be presented to her one

article of Faith that gives the lie to her own nature, since Revelation

and Reason cannot contradict one the other. She has learned, indeed,

that the mysteries of God often transcend her powers, that she cannot

fathom the infinite with the finite; yet never for one moment is she

bidden to evacuate her own position or believe that which she perceives

to be untrue. She has learned her limitations, and with that has come to

understand her inviolable rights.

See, then, how the features of Christ look out through the lineaments of

His Church. She alone dares to claim an act of Divine Faith in herself,

since it is He Who speaks in her Voice. She alone, since she is Divine,

bids the wisest men _become as little children_ at her feet and endows

little children with the wisdom of the ancients. Yet, on the other hand,

in her magnificent Humanity, she has produced through the exercise of

illuminated human Reason such a wealth of theology as the world has

never seen. Is it any wonder that the world thinks both her Faith and

Reason alike too extreme? For her Faith rises from her Divinity and her

Reason from her Humanity; and such an outpouring of Divinity and such an

emphatic Humanity, such a superb confidence in God's revelation and such

untiring labours upon the contents of that Revelation, are altogether

beyond the imagination of a world that in reality, fears both Faith and

Reason alike.

At her feet, and hers only, then, do the wisest and the simple kneel

together--St. Thomas and the child, St. Augustine and the "charcoal

burner"; as diverse, in their humanity, as men can be; as united in the

light of Divinity as only those can be who have found it.

So, then, she goes forward to victory. "First use your reason," she

cries to the world, "to see whether I be not Divine! Then, impelled by

Reason and aided by Grace, rise to Faith. Then once more call up your

Reason, to verify and understand those mysteries which you accept as

true. And so, little by little, vistas of truth will open about you and

doctrines glow with an undreamed-of light. So Faith will be interpreted

by Reason and Reason hold up the hands of Faith, until you come indeed

to the unveiled vision of the Truth whose feet already you grasp in love

and adoration; until you see, face to face in Heaven, Him Who is at once

the Giver of Reason and the _Author of Faith_."

VII

AUTHORITY AND LIBERTY

_The truth shall make you free_.--JOHN VIII. 32.

_Bringing into captivity every understanding to the obedience of

Christ_.--II COR. X. 5.

We have already considered in outline the relations between Faith and

Reason; how each, in its own province, is supreme and how each, in its

turn, supports and ratifies the other. We pass on to a development of

that theme, springing almost immediately out of it, namely, the

relations between Authority and Liberty. And we will begin that

consideration, as before, as it is illustrated by the accusations of the

world against the Church. Briefly they are stated as follows.

I. Freedom, we are told, is the note of Christianity as laid down in the

Gospels, in both discipline and doctrine. Jesus Christ came into the

world largely for this very purpose, to substitute the New Law for the

Old and thereby to free men from the complicated theology and the

minutia of religious routine which characterized men's attempts to

reduce that Old Law to practice. The Old Law may or may not have been

perfectly adapted, when first it was given, to the needs of God's

people in the early stages of Jewish civilization; but at any rate it is

certain, from a hundred texts in the Gospel, that Jesus Christ in His

day found it an intolerable slavery laid upon the religious life of the

people. Theology had degenerated into an incredible hair-splitting

system of dogma, and discipline had degenerated into a multitude of

irritating observances.

Jesus Christ, then, in the place of all this, preached a Creed that was

essentially simple, and simultaneously substituted for the elaborate

ceremonialism of the Pharisees the spirit of liberty. The dogma that He

preached was little more than that God is the Father of all and that all

men therefore are brothers; "discipline" in the ordinary sense of the

word is practically absent from the Gospel, and as for ceremonial there

is none, except such as is necessary for the performance of the two

extremely simple rites that He instituted, Baptism and the Lord's

Supper.

Now this supposed spirit of liberty, we are informed, is to-day to be

found only in Protestantism. In that system, if it can strictly be

called one, and in that system only, may a man exercise that freedom

which was secured to him by Jesus Christ. First, in doctrine, he may

choose, weigh, and examine for himself, within the wide limits which

alone Christ laid down, those doctrines or hopes which commend

themselves to his intellect; and next, in matters of discipline, again,

he may choose for himself those ways of life and action that he may

find helpful to his spiritual development. He may worship, for example,

in any church that he prefers, attend those services and those only

which commend themselves to his taste; he may eat or not eat this or

that food, as he likes, and order his day, generally, as it pleases him.

And all this, we are informed, is of the very spirit of New Testament

Christianity. _The Truth has made him free_, as Christ Himself promised.

The Catholic Church, on the other hand, is essentially a Church of

slavery. First, in discipline, an enormous weight of observances and

duties is laid upon her children, comparable only to the Pharisaic

system. The Catholic must worship in this church and not in that, in

this manner and not in the other. He must observe places and days and

times, and that not only in religious matters but in secular. He must

eat this food on this day and that on the other; he must frequent the

sacraments at specified periods; he must perform certain actions and

refrain from others, and that in matters in themselves indifferent.

In dogma, too, no less is the burden that he must bear. Not only are the

simple words of Christ developed into a vast theological system by the

Church's officials, but the whole of this system is laid, as of faith,

down to its minutest details, on the shoulders of the unhappy believer.

He may not choose between this or that theory of the mode of Christ's

Presence in the Eucharist; he must accept precisely that, and no other,

which his Church has elaborated.

In fact, in doctrine and in discipline alike, the Church has gone back

to precisely that old reign of tyranny which Christ abolished. The

Catholic, unlike the Protestant who has retained the spirit of liberty,

finds himself in the same case as that under which Israel itself once

groaned. He is a slave and not a child; he binds his own limbs, as the

old phrase says, by his act of faith and puts the other end of the chain

into the hands of the priest. Such, in outline, is the charge against

us.

* * * * *

Now much of it is so false that it needs no refutation. It is, for

example, entirely false that New Testament theology is simple. It is far

more true to say that, compared with the systematized theology of the

Church, it is bewilderingly complex and puzzling, and how complex and

puzzling it is, is indicated by the hundreds of creeds which Protestants

have made out of it, each creed claiming, respectively, to be its one

and only proper interpretation. Men have only come to think it "simple"

in modern days by desperately eliminating from it every element on which

all Protestants are not agreed. The residuum is indeed "simple." Only it

is not the New Testament theology! Dogmas such as that of the Blessed

Trinity, of the Procession of the Holy Ghost, of the nature of grace and

of sin--these, whether as held by orthodox or unorthodox, are at any

rate not simple, and it is merely untrue to say that Christ made no

statements on these points, however they may be understood. Further, it

is merely untrue to say that Protestant theology is "simple"; it is

every whit as elaborate as Catholic theology and considerably more

complex in those points in which Protestant divines are not agreed. The

controversies on Justification in which such men as Calvin and Luther,

with their disciples, continually engaged are fully as complicated as

any disputations on Grace between Jesuits and Dominicans.

Yet the general contention is plain enough--that on the whole the

Catholic is bound to believe a certain set of dogmas, while the

Protestant is free to accept or reject them. Therefore, it is argued,

the Protestant is "free" and the Catholic is not. And this brings us

straight to the consideration of the relations between Authority and

Liberty.

II. What, then, is Religious Liberty? It is necessary to begin by

forming some idea as to what it is that is meant by the word in other

than religious matters.

Very briefly it may be said that an individual enjoys social liberty

when he is able to obey and to use the laws and powers of his true

nature, and that a community enjoys it when all its members are able to

do so without interfering unduly one with the other. The more complete

is this ability, the more perfect is Liberty.

A remarkable paradox at once presents itself--that Liberty can only be

secured by Laws. Where there are no laws, or too few, to secure it,

slavery immediately appears, no less surely than when there are too

many; for the stronger individuals are, by the absence of law, enabled

to tyrannize over the weaker. Even the vast and complex legislation of

our own days is designed to increase and not to fetter liberty, and its

greater complexity is necessitated by the greater complexity and the

more numerous interrelationships of modern society. Laws, of course, may

be unwise or excessively minute or deliberately enslaving; yet this does

not affect the point that for all that Laws are necessary to the

preservation of Liberty. Merchants, women and children, and citizens

generally, can only enjoy rightful liberty if they are protected by

laws. Only that man is free, then, who is most carefully guarded.

In the same manner Scientific Liberty does not consist in the absence of

knowledge, or of scientific dogmas, but in their presence. We are

surrounded by innumerable facts of nature, and that man is free who is

fully aware of those which affect his own life. It is true, for example,

that two and two make four, and that heavy bodies tend to fall towards

the centre of the earth; and it can only be a very superficial thinker

who considers that to be ignorant of these facts is to be free from the

enslaving dogmas of them. If I am ignorant of them I am, of course, in a

sense at liberty to believe that two and two make five, and to jump off

the roof of my house; yet this is not Liberty at all in the sense in

which reasonable people use the word, since my knowledge of the laws

enables me to be effective and, in fact, to survive in the midst of a

world where they happen to be true. That man, then, is more truly "free"

whose intellect is informed of and submits to these laws, than is the

man whose intellect is unaware of them. Marconi's intellect submits to

the laws of lightning and he is thereby enabled to avail himself of

them. Ajax is unaware of them and is accordingly destroyed by their

action.

_The Truth_, then, _makes us free_. The State which controls men's

actions and educates their intellects, which, in a word, enforces the

knowledge of truth and compels obedience to it, is actually freeing its

citizens by that process. It is only by a misuse of words or a failure

to grasp ideas that I can maintain that an ignorant savage is more free

than an educated man. It is true that I am, in a sense, "free" to think

that two and two make five, if I have not learned arithmetic; on the

other hand, when I learn that they make four I rise into that higher and

more real liberty which a knowledge of arithmetic bestows. I am more

effective, not less so; I am more free to exercise my powers and use the

forces of the world in which I live, and not less free, when I have

submitted my intellect to facts.

III. (i) Now the soul too has an environment. Men may differ as to its

nature and its conditions, but all who believe in the soul at all

believe also that it has an environment, and that this environment is as

much in the realm of Law as is the natural world itself. Prayer, for

example, elevates the soul, base thinking degrades it.

Now the laws of this environment were true even before Christ came.

David knew, at any rate, something of penitence and of the guilt of sin,

and Nathan knew something, at least, of the forgiveness of sins and of

their temporal punishment. Christ came, then, with this object amongst

others: that He might reveal the laws of Grace and convey to men's minds

some at least of the facts of the spiritual life amongst which they

lived. He came, moreover, partly to modify the workings of these laws,

to release some more fully, and to restrain others; in a word, to be the

Revealer of Truth and the Administrator of Grace.

He came then, to increase men's liberty by increasing their knowledge,

as, in another sphere, the scientist comes to us with the same purpose.

Here, for example, is the law that murder is a sin before God and brings

its consequences with it, a law stated briefly in the commandment _Thou

shall not kill_. But our Divine Lord revealed more of the workings of

this law than men had hitherto recognized. _I say unto you_, declared

Christ, _that whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer._ He revealed,

that is to say, the fact that this law runs even in the realm of

thought, that the hating spirit incurs the guilt and punishment of

murder, and not merely the murderous action. Were men less free when

they learned that fact? Not unless I am less free than I was before,

when I learn for the first time that lightning kills. Christ came, then,

to reveal the _Truth that makes us free_, and He does so by informing

our intellects and enabling us to _bring into captivity every

understanding to _His obedience_.

(ii) Turn now to the Catholic Church. Here is a Society whose function

it is to preserve and apply the teaching of Christ; to analyze it and to

state it in forms or systems which every generation can receive. For

this purpose, then, she draws up not merely a Creed--which is the

systematic statement of the Christian Revelation--but disciplinary rules

and regulations that will make this Creed and the life that is

conformable to it more easy of realization, and all this she does with

the express object of enabling the individual soul to respond to her

spiritual environment and to rise to the full exercise of her powers and

rights. As the scientist and the statesmen take, respectively, the great

laws of nature and society and reduce them to rules and codes, yet

without adding or taking away from these facts, that are true whether

they are popularly recognized or not--and all with the purpose not of

diminishing but of increasing the general liberty--so the Church,

divinely safeguarded too in the process, takes the Revelation of Christ

and by her dogma and her discipline popularizes it, so to speak, and

makes it at once comprehensible and effective.

What, then, is this foolish cry about the slavery of dogma? How can

Truth make men anything except more free? Unless a man is prepared to

say that the scientist enslaves his intellect by telling him facts, he

dare not say that the Church fetters his intellect by defining dogma.

Christ did not condemn the Pharisaic system because it was a system, but

because it was Pharisaic; because, that is, it was not true; because it

obscured instead of revealing the true relations between God and man;

because it _made the Word of God of none effect through its traditions_.

But the Catholic system has the appearance of enslaving men? Why yes;

for the only way of aiming at and using effectively the _truth that

makes us free_ is by _bringing into captivity every understanding to the

obedience of Christ_.

VIII

CORPORATENESS AND INDIVIDUALISM

_He that shall lose his life for My sake shall find it. For what doth it

profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own

soul?_--MATT. XVI. 25, 26.

No recorded word of our Lord better illustrates than does this the

startling and paradoxical manner of His teaching. For He Who _knew what

was in man_, Who spoke always down to man's deepest interests, dwelt and

spoke therefore in that realm of truth where man's own paradoxical

nature is most manifest; where his interests appear to flourish only by

being ruthlessly pruned; where he rises to the highest development of

self only by self-mortification. This is, in fact, the very lesson

Christ teaches in these words. To _find the life_ is the highest object

of every man and the end for which he was created; yet this can be

attained only by the _losing of it for Christ's sake_. Individuality can

be preserved only by the sacrifice of Individualism. Let us break up

this thought and consider it more in detail.

I. (i) Catholics, it is said, are the most fundamentally selfish people

in the whole world, since all that they do and say and think is

directed and calculated, so far as they are "good Catholics," to the

salvation of their own souls. It is this that continually crops up in

their conversation, and this that presumably is their chief

pre-occupation. Yet surely this, above all methods, is the very worst

for achieving such an end. One does not pull up flowers to see how they

are growing. The very secret of health is to be unconscious of it.

Catholics, on the other hand, scarcely ever do anything else; they are

for ever examining themselves, for ever going to confession, for ever

developing and cultivating the narrowest virtues. The whole science of

Casuistry, for example, is directed to nothing else but this--the exact

definition of those limits within which the salvation of the soul is

secure and beyond which it is imperilled; and Casuistry, as we all know,

has a stifling and deadening influence upon all who study it.

Again, see how the true development and expansion of the soul must

necessarily be hindered by such an ideal. "I must not read this book,

however brilliant, since it might be dangerous to my faith. I must not

mix in this company, however charming, since evil communications corrupt

good manners." What kind of life is that which must always be checked

and stunted in this fashion? What kind of salvation can there be that

can only be purchased by the sacrifice of so much that is noble and

inspiring? True life consists in experience, not in introspection; in

going out from self into the world, not in retiring from the world

inwards. Let us therefore live our life without fear, lose ourselves in

humanity, forget self in experience, and leave the rest to God!

(ii) So much for the one side, while from the other comes almost

precisely the opposite criticism. Catholics, it is said, are not nearly

individualistic enough; on the contrary they are for ever sinking

themselves and their personalities in the corporate life of the Church.

Not only are their outward actions checked and their words guarded, but

even their very consciences and thoughts are informed and made by the

collective conscience and mind of others. It is the highest ambition of

every good Catholic _sentire cum ecclesia_; not merely to act and speak

but even to think in obedience to others. Now a man's true life, we are

told, consists in an assertion of his own individuality. God has made no

two men the same; the mould was made and broken in each several case.

If, therefore, we are to be what He meant us to be, we must make the

most of our own personalities; we must think our own thoughts, not other

people's, direct our own lives, speak our own minds--so far, of course,

as we can do so without interfering with our neighbour's equal liberty.

Once more, therefore, we are bidden to live our life to the full; not in

this case, however, because we all share in a common humanity, but

because we do not!

We Catholics are wrong, therefore, for both reasons and in both

directions. We are wrong when we put self first and we are wrong when we

do not. We are wrong when we launch out into the current of life, and

wrong when we withdraw ourselves from its waters. We are wrong when we

insist upon our personal responsibility, and wrong when we look to the

Church to undertake it.

II. (i) Here then, indeed, is a Paradox; but it is one which our Lord

Himself expressly emphasizes. For, first, there is nothing on which He

so repeatedly insists as the supreme and singular value of every soul's

salvation. If this is not attained, all is lost. _What shall it profit a

man if he shall gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own

soul?_ All else, then, must be sacrificed if this is in peril. No human

possession, however great, can be weighed against this. No human tie,

however sacred, can hold against its claim. Not only must _houses and

lands_, but _father and mother and wives and children_ must take second

place, so soon as eternal life is at stake. And yet, somehow or another,

this salvation can only be attained by loss; self can only live if it be

mortified, can only be saved by its own denial. Individuality, as has

been said, can only be preserved by the loss of Individualism.

(ii) But this is not peculiar to the spiritual sphere; it is a paradox

that is true, in some sense, of life on every plane--civic,

intellectual, artistic, human. The man that desires to bring his

intellectual and personal powers to their highest pitch must

continually be sinking them, so to speak, in the current of his fellows,

continually exhausting, using, and wearing them out. He must risk, and

indeed inevitably lose, in a very real sense, his personal point of

view, if he is to have a point of view that is worth possessing; he must

be content to see his theories and his thoughts modified, merged,

changed, and destroyed, if his thought is to be of value. For, so far as

he withdraws himself from his fellows into a physical or mental

isolation, so far he approaches egotistic madness. He cannot grow unless

he decreases; he cannot remain himself unless he ceases to be himself.

So, too, is it in civic and artistic life. The citizen who truly lives

to the State of which he is a member--the man to whom his country raises

a monument, for example--is one, always, who has _lost himself_ for his

nation, whether he has died in battle or sacrificed himself in politics

or philanthropy. And the citizen who has merely hugged his citizenship

to himself, who has enjoyed all the privileges he can get and paid

nothing for them,--least of all himself--who has, so to say, _gained the

whole world_, has simultaneously lost himself indeed and is forgotten

within a year of his death. So with the artist. The man who has made his

art serve him, who has employed it, let us say, purely for the sake of

the money he could get out of it, who has kept it within severe limits,

who has been merely prudent and orderly and restrained, this man has, in

a sense, _saved his own life_; yet simultaneously he has lost it. But

the man to whom art is a passion, to whom nothing else is comparatively

of any value, who has plunged himself in his art, has dedicated to it

his days and his nights, has sacrificed to it every power of his being

and every energy of his mind and body, this man has indeed _lost

himself_. Yet he lives in his art as the other has not, he has _saved

himself_ in a sense of which the other knows nothing; and exactly in

proportion as he has succeeded in his self-abnegation, so far has he

attained, as we say, immortality. There is not, then, one sphere of life

in which the paradox is not true. The great historical lovers in

romance, the pioneers of science, the immortals in every plane, are

precisely those that have fulfilled on lower levels the spiritual

aphorism of Jesus Christ.

(iii) Turn, then, once more to the Catholic Church and see how in the

Life which she offers, as in none other, there is presented to us a

means of fulfilling our end.

For it is she alone who even demands in the spiritual sphere a complete

and entire abnegation of self. From every other Christian body comes the

cry, Save your soul, assert your individuality, follow your conscience,

form your opinions; while she, and she alone, demands from her children

the sacrifice of their intellect, the submitting of their judgment, the

informing of their conscience by hers, and the obedience of their will

to her lightest command. For she, and she alone, is conscious of

possessing that Divinity, in complete submission to which lies the

salvation of Humanity. For she, as the coherent and organic mystical

Body of Christ, calls upon those who look to her to become, not merely

her children, but her very members; not to obey her as soldiers obey a

leader or citizens a Government, but as the hands and eyes and feet obey

a brain. Once, therefore, I understand this, I understand too how it is

that by being lost in her I save myself; that I lose only that which

hinders my activity, not that which fosters it. For when is my hand most

itself? When separated from the body, by paralysis or amputation? Or

when, in vital union with the brain, with every fibre alert and every

nerve alive, it obeys in every gesture and receives in every sensation a

life infinitely vaster and higher than any which it might, temporarily,

enjoy in independence? It is true that its capacity for pain is the

greater when it is so united, and that it would cease to suffer if once

its separation were accomplished; yet, simultaneously, it would lose all

that for which God made it and, _saving itself_, would be _lost_ indeed.

_I live_, then, the perfect Catholic may say, as none other can say,

when I have ceased to be myself. And _yet not I_, since I have lost my

Individualism. No longer do I claim any activity at all on my own

behalf; no longer do I demand to form my opinions, to follow my own

conscience apart from that informing of it that comes from God, or to

live my own life. Yet in losing my Individualism I have won my

Individuality, for I have found my true place at last. I have _lost the

whole world?_ Yes, so far as that world is separate from or antagonistic

to God's will; but I have _gained my own soul_ and attained immortality.

For it is _not I that live, but Christ that liveth in me_.

IX

MEEKNESS AND VIOLENCE

_Blessed are the meek_.--MATT. V. 4.

_The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it

away_.--MATT. XI. 12.

We have already considered the Church's relations towards such things as

wealth and human influence and power, how she will sometimes use and

sometimes disdain them. Let us now penetrate a little deeper and

understand the spirit that underlies and explains this varying attitude

of hers.

I. (i) It has been charged against Christianity in general, and

therefore implicitly and supremely against the Church that was for so

long its sole embodiment and is still, alone, its adequate

representative, that it has fostered virtues which retard progress.

Progress, in the view of the German philosopher who explicitly made this

charge, is merely natural both in its action and its end; and Nature, as

we are well aware, knows nothing of forgiveness or compassion or

tenderness: on the contrary she moves from lower to higher forms by

forces that are their precise opposite. The wounded stag is not

protected by his fellows, but gored to death; the old wolf is torn to

pieces, the sick lion wanders away to die of starvation, and all these

instincts, we are informed, have for their object the gradual

improvement of the breed by the elimination of the weak and ineffective.

So should it be, he tells us, with man, and the extreme Eugenists echo

his teaching. Christianity, on the other hand, deliberately protects the

weak and teaches that the sacrifice of the strong is supreme heroism.

Christianity has raised hospitals and refuges for the infirm, seeking to

preserve those very types which Nature, if she had her way, would

eliminate. Christianity, then, is the enemy of the human race and not

its friend, since Christianity has retarded, as no other religion has

ever succeeded in retarding, the appearance of that superman whom Nature

seeks to evolve.... It is scarcely to be wondered at that the teacher of

such a doctrine himself died insane.

A parallel doctrine is taught largely to-day by persons who call

themselves practical and businesslike. Meekness and gentleness and

compassion, they tell their sons, are very elegant and graceful virtues

for those who can afford them, for women and children who are more or

less sheltered from the struggle of life, and for feeble and ineffective

people who are capable of nothing else. But for men who have to make

their own way in the world and intend to win success there, a more stern

code is necessary; from these there is demanded such a rule of action as

Nature herself dictates. Be self-confident and self-assertive then, not

meek. Remember that the weakness of your neighbour is your own

opportunity. Take care of number one and let the rest take care of

themselves. A man does not go into the stock-exchange or into commerce

in order to exhibit Christian virtues there, but business qualities. In

a word, Christianity, so far as it affects material or commercial or

political progress, is a weakness rather than a strength, an enemy

rather than a friend.

(ii) But if, on the one side, the gentleness and non-resistance

inculcated by Christianity form the material of one charge against the

Church, on the other side, no less, she is blamed for her violence and

intransigeance. Catholics are not yielding enough, we are told, to be

true followers of the meek Prophet of Galilee, not gentle enough to

inherit the blessing which He pronounced. On the contrary there are no

people so tenacious, so obstinate, and even so violent as these

professed disciples of Jesus Christ. See the way, for example, in which

they cling to and insist upon their rights; the obstacles they raise,

for example, to reasonable national schemes of education or to a

sensible system in the divorce courts. And above all, consider their

appalling and brutal violence as exhibited in such institutions as that

of the Index and Excommunication, the fierceness with which they insist

upon absolute and detailed obedience to authority, the ruthlessness with

which they cast out from their company those who will not pronounce

their shibboleths. It is true that in these days they can only enforce

their claims by spiritual threatenings and penalties, but history shows

us that they would do more if they could. The story of the racks and the

fires of the Inquisition shows plainly enough that the Church once used,

and therefore, presumably, would use again if she could, carnal weapons

in her spiritual warfare. Can anything be more unlike the gentle Spirit

of Him Who, _when He was reviled, reviled not again;_ of Him Who bade

men to _learn of Him, for He was meek and lowly of heart_, and so _find

rest to their souls?_

Here, then, is the Paradox, and here are two characteristics of the

Catholic Church: that she is at once too meek and too self-assertive,

too gentle and too violent. It is a paradox exactly echoed by our Divine

Lord Himself, Who in the Upper Chamber bade His disciples who _had no

sword_ to _sell their cloaks and buy them_, and Who yet, in the garden

of Gethsemane, commanded the one disciple who had taken Him at His word

to _put up the sword into its sheath_, telling him that _they who took

the sword should perish by it_. It is echoed yet again in His action,

first in taking the scourge into His own Hand, in the temple courts, and

then in baring His shoulders to that same scourge in the hands of

others. How, then, is this Paradox to be reconciled?

II. The Church, let us remind ourselves again, is both Human and Divine.

(i) She consists of human persons, and those persons are attached both

to one another and to the world outside by a perfectly balanced system

of human rights known as the Law of Justice. This Law of Justice, though

coming indeed from God, is, in a sense, natural and human; it exists to

some extent in all societies, as well as being closely defined and

worked out in the Old Law given on Sinai. It is a Law which men could

have worked out, at any rate in its main principles, by the light of

reason only, unaided by Revelation, and it is a Law, further, so

fundamental that no Revelation could conceivably ever outrage or set it

aside.

At the coming of Christ into the world, however, Supernatural Charity

came with Him. The Law of Justice still remained; men still had their

rights on which they might insist, still had their rights which no

Christian may refuse to recognize. But such was the torrent of Divine

generosity which Christ exhibited, so overwhelming was the Vision which

He revealed of the supernatural charity of God towards men, that a set

of ideals sprang into life such as the world had never dreamed of; more,

Charity came with such power that her commands actually overruled in

many instances the feeble claims of Justice, so that she bade men

henceforward to forgive, for example, not merely according to Justice,

but according to her own Divine nature, to _forgive unto seventy times

seven_, to give _good measure, heaped up and running over_, and not the

bare minimum which men had merely earned.

It was from this advent of Charity, then, that all these essentially

Christian virtues of generosity and meekness and self-sacrifice sprang

which Nietsche condemned as hostile to material progress.

For, from henceforth, if _a man take thy coat, let him take thy cloak

also; if he will compel thee to go with him one mile, go two; if he

strike thee on one cheek, turn to him the other also_. The Law of

Natural justice is transcended and the Law of Charity and Sacrifice

reigns instead. _Resist not evil_; do not insist always, that is to say,

on your natural rights; give men more than their due, and be yourself

content with less. _Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and

find rest to your souls. Forgive one another your trespasses_ with the

same generous charity with which God has forgiven and will forgive you

yours. _Judge not and you shall not be judged._ Do not, in personal

matters, insist upon bare justice for yourself, but act on that scale

and by those principles by which God Himself has dealt with you.

Meekness, then, is undoubtedly a Christian virtue. Sometimes it is

obligatory, sometimes it is but a Counsel of Perfection; it stands, in

any case, high among those ideals which it has been the glory of

Christianity to create.

(ii) But there are other elements in life besides the human and the

natural, beyond those personal rights and claims which a Christian may,

if he is aiming at perfection, set aside out of charity. The Church is

Divine as well as Human.

For the Church has entrusted to her, besides the rights of men, which

may be sacrificed by their possessors, the rights and claims of God,

which none but He can set aside. He has given into her keeping, for

example, a Revelation of truths and principles which, springing out of

His own Nature or of His Will, are as immutable and eternal as Himself.

And it is precisely in defence of these truths and principles that the

Church exhibits that which the world calls _intransigeance_ and Jesus

Christ _violence_.

Here, for example, is the right of a baptized Catholic child to be

educated in his religion, or rather, the right of God Himself to teach

that child in the manner He has ordained. Here is the revealed truth

that marriage is indissoluble; here that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

Now these are not human rights or opinions at all--rights and opinions

which men, urged by charity or humility, can set aside or waive in the

face of opposition. They rest on an entirely different basis; they are,

so to speak, the inalienable possessions of God; and it would neither be

charity nor humility, but sheer treachery, for the Church to exhibit

meekness or pliancy in matters such as these, given to her as they are,

not to dispose of, but to guard intact. On the contrary here, exactly,

comes the command, _He that hath not, let him sell his cloak and buy a

sword,_, for here comes the line between the Divine and the Human; let

all personal possessions go, all merely natural rights and claims be

yielded, and let a sword take their place. For here is a matter that

must be _resisted, even unto blood_.

The Catholic Church then is, and always will be, _violent_ and

intransigeant when the rights of God are in question. She will be

absolutely ruthless, for example, towards heresy, for heresy affects not

personal matters on which Charity may yield, but a Divine right on which

there must be no yielding. Yet, simultaneously, she will be infinitely

kind towards the heretic, since a thousand human motives and

circumstances may come in and modify his responsibility. At a word of

repentance she will readmit his person into her treasury of souls, but

not his heresy into her treasury of wisdom; she will strike his name

eagerly and freely from her black list of the rebellious, but not his

book from the pages of her Index. She exhibits meekness towards him and

_violence_ towards his error; since he is human, but her Truth is

Divine.

It is, then, from a modern confusion of thought with regard to the

realms of the Divine and the Human that the amazing inability arises, on

the world's part, to understand the respective principles on which the

Catholic Church acts in these two and utterly separate departments. The

world considers it reasonable for a country to defend its material

possessions by the sword, but intolerant and unreasonable for the Church

to condemn, _resisting even unto blood_, principles which she considers

erroneous or false. The Church, on the other hand, urges her children

again and again to yield rather than to fight when merely material

possessions are at stake, since Charity permits and sometimes even

commands men to be content with less than their own rights, and yet

again, when a Divine truth or right is at stake, here she will resist

unfaltering and undismayed, since she cannot be "charitable" with what

is not her own; here she will _sell her cloak_ and _buy that sword_

which, when the dispute was on merely temporal matters, she thrust back

again into its sheath.

To-day[1] as Christ rides into Jerusalem we see, as in a mirror, this

Paradox made plain. _Thy King cometh to thee, meek_. Was there ever so

mean a Procession as this? Was there ever such meekness and charity? He

Who, as His personal right, is attended in heaven by a _multitude on

white horses_, now, in virtue of His Humanity, is content with a few

fishermen and a crowd of children. He to Whom, in His personal right,

the harpers and the angels make eternal music is content, since He has

been made Man for our sakes, with the discordant shoutings of this

crowd. He Who _rode on the Seraphim and came flying on the wings of the

wind_ sits on the colt of an ass. He comes, meek indeed, from the golden

streets of the Heavenly Jerusalem to the foul roads of the Earthly,

laying aside His personal rights since He is that very Fire of Charity

by which Christians relinquish theirs.

[Footnote 1: This sermon was preached on Palm-Sunday.]

But, for all that, it is _riding_ that _thy King cometh to thee_.... He

will not relinquish His inalienable claim and He will have nothing

essential left out. He has His royal escort, even though a ragged one;

He will have His spearmen, even though their spears be only of palm; He

will have His heralds to proclaim Him, however much the devout Pharisees

may be offended by their proclamation; He will ride into His own Royal

City, even though that City casts Him out, and He will have His

Coronation, even though it be with thorns. So, too, the Catholic Church

advances through the ages.

In merely human rights and personal matters again and again she will

yield up all that she has, making, it may be, but one protest for

Justice' sake and then no more. And she will urge her children to do the

same. If the world will let her have no jewels, then she will put glass

beads in her monstrance, and for marble she will use plaster, and tinsel

for gold.

But she will have her Procession and insist upon her Royalty. It may

seem as poor and as mean and as tawdry as the entrance of Christ Himself

through the royal gate; for she will yield up all that the world demands

of her, so long as her Divine Right itself remains intact. She will

issue her orders, though few be found to obey them; she will cast out

from her the rebellious who question her authority, and cleanse her

Temple Courts even though with a scourge at which men mock. She will

give up all that is merely human, if the world will have it so, and will

_resist not evil_ if it merely concerns herself. But there is one thing

which she will not renounce, one thing she will claim, even with

_violence_ and "intransigeance," and that is the Royalty with which God

Himself has crowned her.

X

THE SEVEN WORDS

THE "THREE HOURS"

INTRODUCTION

The value, to the worshippers, of the Devotion of the Three Hours' Agony

is in proportion to the degree in which they understand that they are

watching not so much the tragedy of nineteen hundred years ago as the

tragedy of their own lives and times. Merely to dwell on the Death of

Christ on Calvary would scarcely avail them more than to study the

details of the assassination of Caesar at the foot of Pompey's statue.

Such considerations might indeed be interesting, exciting, and even a

little instructive or inspiring; but they could not be better than this,

and they might be no better than morbid and harmful.

The Death of Christ, however, is unique because it is, so to say,

universal. It is more than the crowning horror of all murderous

histories; it is more even than the _type_ of all the outrages that men

have ever committed against God. For it is just the very enactment, upon

the historical stage of the world, of those repeated interior tragedies

that take place in every soul that rejects or insults Him; since the God

whom we crucify within is the same God that was once crucified without.

There is not an exterior detail in the Gospel which may not be

interiorly repeated in the spiritual life of a sinner; the process

recorded by the Evangelists must be more or less identical with the

process of all apostasy from God.

For, first, there is the Betrayal of Conscience, as a beginning of the

tragedy; its betrayal by those elements of our nature that are intended

as its friends and protectors--by Emotion or Forethought, for example.

Then Conscience is led away, bound, to be judged; for there can be no

mortal sin without deliberation, and no man ever yet fell into it

without conducting first a sort of hasty mock-trial or two in which a

sham Prudence or a false idea of Liberty solemnly decide that Conscience

is in the wrong. Yet even then Conscience persists, and so He is made to

appear absurd and ridiculous, and set beside the Barabbas of a coarse

and sturdy lower nature that makes no high pretensions and boasts of it.

And so the drama proceeds and Conscience is crucified: Conscience begins

to be silent, breaking the deepening gloom now and again with protests

that grow weaker every time, and at last Conscience dies indeed. And

thenceforward there can be no hope, save in the miracle of Resurrection.

This Cross of Calvary, then, is not a mere type or picture; it is a

fact identical with that so dreadfully familiar to us in spiritual life.

For Christ is not one Person, and Conscience something else, but it is

actually Christ who speaks in Conscience and Christ, therefore, Who is

crucified in mortal sin.

Let us, then, be plain with ourselves. We are watching not only Christ's

Death but our own, since we are watching the Death of Christ _Who is our

Life_.

THE FIRST WORD

_Father forgive them, for they know not what they do_.

In previous considerations we have studied the Life of Christ in His

Mystical Body from an angle at which the strange and innumerable

paradoxes which abound in all forms of life at a certain depth become

visible. And we have seen how these paradoxes lie in those strata, so to

say, where the Divinity and the Humanity meet. Christ is God and God

cannot die; therefore Christ became man in order to be able to do so.

The Church is Divine and therefore all-holy, but she dwells in a Body of

sinful Humanity and reckons her sinners to be her children and members

no less than her saints.

We will continue to regard the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Words

which He spoke from the Cross from the same angle, and to find,

therefore, the same characteristic paradoxes and mysteries in all that

we see. In the First Word we meet the _Paradox of Divine Forgiveness_.

I. Ordinary human forgiveness is no more than a natural virtue,

resulting from a natural sense of justice, and if a man is normal, his

forgiveness will be a natural and inevitable part of the process of

reconciliation so soon as a certain kind of restitution has been made.

For example, a friend of mine sins against me--he injures, perhaps, my

good name; and my natural answer is the emotion of resentment towards

him and, perhaps, of actual revenge. But what I chiefly resent is my

friend's stupidity and his ignorance of my real character. "I am angry,"

I say, with perfect sincerity, "not so much at the thing he has said of

me, as at this proof of his incapacity to understand me. I thought he

was my friend, that he was in sympathy with my character or, at least,

that he understood it sufficiently to do me justice. But now, from what

he has just said of me, I see that he does not. If the thing he said

were true of me, the most of my anger would be gone. But I see that he

does not know me, after all."

And then, presently, my friend does understand that he has wronged me;

that the gossip he repeated or the construction he put upon my actions

was not fair or true. And immediately that I become aware of this, from

him or from another, my resentment goes, if I have any natural virtue at

all; it goes because my wounded pride is healed. I forgive him easily

and naturally because he knows now what he has done.

II. How entirely different from this easy, self-loving, human

forgiveness is the Divine Forgiveness of Christ! Now it is true that in

the conscience of Pilate, the unjust representative of justice, and in

that thing that called itself conscience in Herod, and in the hearts of

the priests who denounced their God, and of the soldiers who executed

their overlord, and of Judas who betrayed his friend, in all these there

was surely a certain uneasiness--such an uneasiness is actually recorded

of the first and the last of the list--a certain faint shadow of

perception and knowledge of what it was that they had done and were

doing. And, for the natural man, it would have been comparatively easy

to forgive such injuries on that account. "I forgive them," such a man

might have said from his cross, "because there is just a glimmer of

knowledge left; there is just one spark in their hearts that still does

me justice, and for the sake of that I can try, at least, to put away my

resentment and ask God to forgive them."

But Jesus Christ cries, "Forgive them because they do _not_ know what

they do! Forgive them because they need it so terribly, since they do

not even know that they need it! Forgive in them that which is

unforgivable!"

III. Two obvious points present themselves in conclusion.

(1) First, it is _Divine_ Forgiveness that we need, since no sinner of

us all knows the full malice of sin. One man is a slave, let us say, to

a sin of the flesh, and seeks to reassure himself by the reflection that

he injures no one but himself; ignorant as he is of the outrage to God

the Holy Ghost Whose temple he is ruining. Or a woman repeats again

every piece of slanderous gossip that comes her way and comforts herself

in moments of compunction by reflecting that she "means no harm";

ignorant as she is of the discouragement of souls of which she is the

cause and of the seeds of distrust and enmity sown among friends. In

fact it is incredible that any sinner ever _knows what it is that he

does_ by sin. We need, therefore, the Divine Forgiveness and not the

human, the pardon that descends when we are unaware that we must have it

or die; the love of the Father Who, _while we are yet a great way off,

runs to meet_ us, and Who teaches us for the first time, by the warmth

of His welcome, the icy distances to which we had wandered. If we

_knew_, anyone could forgive us. It is because we do not that only God,

Who knows all things, can forgive us effectively.

(2) And it is this _Divine_ Forgiveness that we ourselves have to extend

to those that sin against us, since only those who so forgive can be

forgiven. We must not wait until wounded pride is made whole by the

conscious shame of our enemy; until the debt is paid by acknowledgment

and we are complacent once more in the knowledge that justice has been

done to us at last. On the contrary, the only forgiveness that is

supernatural, and which, therefore, alone is meritorious, is that which

reach out to men's ignorance and not their knowledge of their need.

THE SECOND WORD

_Amen I say to thee, to-day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise._

Our Divine Lord, in this Second Word, immediately applies and

illustrates the First and drives its lesson home. He shows us how the

rain of mercy that poured out of heaven in answer to the prayer He made

just now enlightens the man who, above all others present on Calvary,

was the most abjectly ignorant of all; the man who, himself at the very

heart of the tragedy, understood it less, probably, than the smallest

child on the outskirts of the crowd.

His life had been one long defiance of the laws of both God and man. He

had been a member of one of those troops of human vermin that crawl

round Jerusalem, raiding solitary houses, attacking solitary travellers,

guilty of sins at once the bloodiest and the meanest, comparable only to

the French _apaches_ of our own day. Well, he had been gripped at last

by the Roman machine, caught in some sordid adventure, and here,

resentful and furious and contemptuous, full of bravado and terror, he

snarled like a polecat at every human face he saw, snarled and spat at

the Divine Face Itself that looked at him from a cross that was like his

own; and, since he had not even a spark of the honour that is reputed to

exist "among thieves," taunted his "fellow criminal" for the folly of

His "crime."

"If thou be the Christ, save Thyself and us."

Again, then, the Paradox is plain enough. Surely an educated priest, or

a timid disciple, or a good-hearted dutiful soldier who hated the work

he was at, surely one of these will be the first object of Christ's

pardon; and so one of these would have been, if one of ourselves had

hung there. But when God forgives, He forgives the most ignorant

first--that is, the most remote from forgiveness--and makes, not Peter

or Caiphas or the Centurion, but Dismas the thief, the firstfruits of

Redemption.

I. The first effect of the Divine Mercy is Enlightenment. _Before they

call, I will answer_. Before the thief feels the first pang of sorrow

Grace is at work on him, and for the first time in his dreary life he

begins to understand. And an extraordinary illumination shines in his

soul. For no expert penitent after years of spirituality, no sorrowful

saint, could have prayed more perfectly than this outcast. His

intellect, perhaps, took in little or nothing of the great forces that

were active about him and within him; he knew, perhaps, explicitly

little or nothing of Who this was that hung beside him; yet his soul's

intuition pierces to the very heart of the mystery and expresses itself

in a prayer that combines at once a perfect love, an exquisite humility,

an entire confidence, a resolute hope, a clear-sighted faith, and an

unutterable patience; his soul blossoms all in a moment: _Lord, remember

me when Thou comest in Thy Kingdom_. He saw the glory behind the shame,

the Eternal Throne behind the Cross, and the future behind the present;

and he asked only to be _remembered_ when the glory should transfigure

the shame and the Cross be transformed into the Throne; for he

understood what that remembrance would mean: "_Remember, Lord_, that I

suffered at Thy side."

II. So perfect, then, are the dispositions formed in him by grace that

at one bound _the last is first_. Not even Mary and John shall have the

instant reward that shall be his; for them there are other gifts, and

the first are those of separation and exile. For the moment, then, this

man steps into the foremost place and they who have hung side by side on

Calvary shall walk side by side to meet those waiting souls beyond the

veil who will run so eagerly to welcome them. _To-day thou shalt be with

Me in Paradise._

III. Now this Paradox, _the last shall be first_, is an old doctrine of

Christ, so startling and bewildering that He has been forced to repeat

it again and again. He taught it in at least four parables: in the

parables of _the Lost Piece of Silver, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal

Son_, and _the Vineyard_. The Nine Pieces lie neglected on the table,

the Ninety-nine sheep are exiled in the Fold, the Elder Son is, he

thinks, overlooked and slighted, and the Labourers complain of

favouritism. Yet still, even after all this teaching, the complaint goes

up from Christians that God is too loving to be quite just. A convert,

perhaps, comes into the Church in middle age and in a few months

develops the graces of Saint Teresa and becomes one of her daughters. A

careless black-guard is condemned to death for murder and three weeks

later dies upon the scaffold the death of a saint, at the very head of

the line. And the complaints seem natural enough. _Thou hast made them

equal unto us who have borne the burden and heat of the day_.

Yet look again, you Elder Sons. Have your religious, careful, timid

lives ever exhibited anything resembling that depth of self-abjection to

which the Younger Son has attained? Certainly you have been virtuous and

conscientious; after all, it would be a shame if you had not been so,

considering the wealth of grace you have always enjoyed. But have you

ever even striven seriously after the one single moral quality which

Christ holds up in His own character as the point of imitation: _Learn

of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart_? It is surely significant that

He does not say, expressly, Learn of Me to be pure, or courageous, or

fervent; but _Learn to be humble_, for in this, above all, you shall

_find rest to your souls_. Instead, have you not had a kind of gentle

pride in your religion or your virtue or your fastidiousness? In a

word, you have not been as excellent an Elder Son as your brother has

been a Younger. You have not corresponded with your graces as he has

corresponded with his. You have never yet been capable of sufficient

lowliness to come home (which is so much harder than to remain there),

or of sufficient humility to begin for the first time to work with all

your heart only an hour before sunset.

Begin, then, at the beginning, not half-way up the line. Go down to the

church door and beat your breast and say not, God reward me who have

done so much for Him, but _God be merciful to me_ who have done so

little. Get off your seat amongst the Pharisees and go down on your

knees and weep behind Christ's couch, if perhaps He may at last say to

you, _Friend, come up higher_.

THE THIRD WORD

_Woman, behold thy son. Behold thy mother_.

Our Divine Lord now turns, from the soul who at one bound has sprung

into the front rank, to those two souls who have never left it, and

supremely to that Mother on whose soul sin has never yet breathed, on

whose breast Incarnate God had rested as inviolate and secure as on the

Bosom of the Eternal Father, that Mother who was His Heaven on earth.

Standing beside her is the one human being who is least unworthy to be

there, now that Joseph has passed to his reward and John the Baptist has

gone to join the Prophets--_the disciple whom Jesus loved_, who had lain

on the breast of Jesus as Jesus had lain on the breast of Mary.

Our Lord has just shown how He deals with His dear sinners; now He shows

how He will _be glorified with His Saints_. The Paradox of this Word is

that Death, the divider of those who are separated from God, is the bond

of union between those that are united to Him.

I. Death is the one inexorable enemy of human society as constituted

apart from God. A king dies and his kingdom is at once in danger of

disruption. A child dies and his mother prays that she may bear another,

lest his father and she should drift apart. Death is the supreme sower

of discord and disunion, then, in the natural order, since he is the one

supreme enemy of natural life. He is the noonday terror of the Rich Fool

of the parable and the nightmare of the Poor Fool, since those who place

their hope in this life see that death is the end of their hope. For

these there is no appeal beyond the grave.

II. Now precisely the opposite of all this is true in the supernatural

order, since the gate of death, viewed from the supernatural side, is an

entrance and not an ending, a beginning and not a close. This may be

seen to be so even in a united human family in this world, the members

of whom are living the supernatural life; for where such a family is

living in the love of God, Death, when he comes, draws not only the

survivors closer together, but even those whom he seems to have

separated. He does not bring consternation and terror and disunion, but

he awakens hope and tenderness, he smooths away old differences, he

explains old misunderstandings.

Our Blessed Lord has already, over the grave of Lazarus, hinted that

this shall be so, so soon as He has consecrated death by His own dying.

_He that believeth in Me shall never die_. He, that is to say, who has

_died with Christ_, whose centre henceforward is in the supernatural,

simply no longer finds death to be what nature finds it. It no longer

makes for division but for union; it no longer imperils or ends life and

interest and possession, but releases them from risk and mortality.

Here, then, He deliberately and explicitly acts upon this truth. He once

raised Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus and the Widow's Son from the

dead, for death's sting could, at that time, be drawn in no other way;

but now that He Himself is _tasting death for every man_, He performs an

even more emphatically supernatural act and conquers death by submitting

to it instead of by commanding it. Life had already united, so far as

mortal life can unite, those two souls who loved Him and one another so

well. These two, since they knew Him so perfectly, knew each the other

too as perfectly as knowledge and sympathy can unite souls in this

life. But now the whole is to be raised a stage higher. They had already

been united on the living breast of Jesus; now, over His dead body, they

were to be made yet more one.

It is marvellous that, after so long, our imaginations should still be

so tormented and oppressed by the thought of death; that we should still

be so _without understanding_ that we think it morbid to be in love with

death, for it is far more morbid to be in fear of it. It is not that our

reason or our faith are at fault; it is only that that most active and

untamable faculty of ours, which we call imagination, has not yet

assimilated the truth, accepted by both our faith and our reason, that

for those who are in the friendship of God death is simply not that at

all which it is to others. It does not, as has been said, end our lives

or our interests: on the contrary it liberates and fulfils them.

And all this it does because Jesus Christ has Himself plunged into the

heart of Death and put out his fires. Henceforth we are one family in

Him if we do His will--_his brother and sister and mother_; and Mary is

our Mother, not by nature, which is accidental, but by supernature,

which is essential. Mary is my Mother and John is my brother, since, if

I have died with Christ, it is _no longer I that live, but Christ that

liveth in me_. In a word, it is the Communion of Saints which He

inaugurates by this utterance and seals by His dying.

THE FOURTH WORD

_My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?_

Our Blessed Lord in the revelation He makes from the Cross passes

gradually inwards to Himself Who is its centre. He begins in the

outermost circle of all, with the ignorant sinners. He next deals with

the one sinner who ceased to be ignorant, and next with those who were

always nearest to Himself, and now at last He reveals the deepest secret

of all. This is the central Word of the Seven in every sense. There is

no need to draw attention to the Paradox it expresses.

I. First, then, let us remind ourselves of the revealed dogma that Jesus

Christ was the Eternal Son of the Father; that He dwelt always in the

Bosom of that Father; that when He left heaven He _did not leave the

Father's side_; that at Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee and Jerusalem

and Gethsemane and Calvary He was always the _Word that was with God_

and _the Word_ that _was God_. Next, that the eyes even of His Sacred

Humanity looked always and continuously upon the Face of God, since His

union with God was entire and complete: as He looked up into His

Mother's face from the manger, He saw behind it the Face of His Father;

as He cried in Gethsemane, _If it be possible_, even in His Sacred

Humanity He knew that it could not be; as He groaned out on Calvary that

God had forsaken Him, He yet looked without one instant's intermission

into the glory of heaven and saw His Father there.

Yet simultaneously with these truths it is also true that His cry of

dereliction was incalculably more of a reality than when first uttered

by David or, since, by any desolate sinner in the thickest spiritual

darkness. All the miseries of holy and sinful souls, heaped together,

could not approach even afar off the intolerable misery of Christ. For

of His own will He refused to be consoled at all by that Presence which

He could never lack, and of His own will He chose to be pierced and

saturated and tormented by the sorrow He could never deserve. He held

firm against the touch of consolation every power of His Divine and

Human Being and, simultaneously, flung them open to the assaults of

every pain. And if the psychology of this state is altogether beyond our

power to understand, we may remind ourselves that it is the psychology

of the _Word made Flesh_ that is confronting us.... Do we expect to

understand that?...

II. There is a human phrase, however, itself a paradox, yet

corresponding to something which we know to be true, which throws some

faint glimmer of light upon this impenetrable darkness and seems to

extend Christ's experience upon the Cross so as to touch our own human

life. It is a phrase that describes a condition well known to spiritual

persons: "To leave God for God." (1) The simplest and lowest form of

this state is that condition in which we acquiesce with our will in the

withdrawal of ordinary spiritual consolation. Certainly it is an

inexplicable state, since both the ordinary aids to our will--our

understanding and our emotion--are, by the very nature of the case,

useless to it. Our heart revolts from that dereliction and our

understanding fails to comprehend the reasons for it. Yet we acquiesce,

or at least perceive that we ought to do so; and that by doing so--by

ceasing, that is, to grasp God's Presence any longer--we find it as

never before. We leave God in order to find Him.

(2) The second state is that in which we find ourselves when not only do

all consolations leave us, but the very grip of intelligent faith goes

too; when the very reasons for faithfulness appear to vanish. It is an

incalculably more bitter trial, and soul after soul fails under it and

must be comforted again by God in less august ways or perish altogether.

And yet this is not the extremest pitch even of human desolation.

(3) For there is a third of which the saints tell us in broken words and

images....

III. Our final point, for application to ourselves, is that dereliction

in some form or another is as much a stage in spiritual progress as

autumn and winter are seasons of the year. The beginners have to suffer

one degree, the illuminated another, and those that have approached a

real Union with God a third. But all must suffer it, and each in his

own degree, or progress is impossible.

Let us take courage therefore and face it, in the light of this Word.

For, as we can sanctify bodily pain by the memory of the nails, so too

can we sanctify spiritual pain by the memory of this darkness. If He Who

_never left the Father's side_ can suffer this in an unique and supreme

sense, how much more should we be content to suffer it in lower degrees,

who have so continually, since we came to the age of reason, been

leaving not His side only, but His very house.

THE FIFTH WORD

_I thirst._

Our Lord continues to reveal His own condition, since He, after all, is

the key to all Humanity. If we understand anything of Him,

simultaneously we shall understand ourselves far better.

He has shown us that He can truly be deprived of spiritual consolation;

and the value of this deprivation; now He shows us the value of bodily

deprivation also. And the Paradox for our consideration is that the

Source of all can lose all; that the Creator needs His creation; that He

Who offers us the _water springing up into Life Eternal_ can lack the

water of human life--the simplest element of all. In His Divine

Dereliction He yet continues to be Human.

I. It is very usual, under this Word, to meditate on Christ's thirst for

souls; and this is, of course, a legitimate thought, since it is true

that His whole Being, and not merely one part of it, longed and panted

on the Cross for every object of His desire. Certainly He desired souls!

When does He not?

But it is easy to lose the proportion of truth, if we spiritualize

everything, and pass over, as if unworthy of consideration, His bodily

pain. For this Thirst of the Crucified is the final sum of all the pains

of crucifixion: the physical agony, the fever produced by it, the

torrential sweat, the burning of the sun--all these culminated in the

torment of which this Cry is His expression.

Bodily pain, then, since Jesus not only deigned to suffer it, but to

speak of it, is as much a part of the Divine process as the most

spiritual of derelictions: it is an intense and a vital reality in life.

It is the fashion, at present, to pose as if we were superior to such

things; as if either it were too coarse for our high natures or even

actually in itself evil. The truth is that we are terrified of its

reality and its sting, and seek, therefore, to evade it by every means

in our power. We affect to smile at the old penances of the saints and

ascetics as if we ourselves had risen into a higher state of development

and needed no longer such elementary aids to piety!

Let this Word, then, bring us back to our senses and to the due

proportions of truth. We are body as well as soul; we are incomplete

without the body. The soul is insufficient to itself, the body has as

real a part to play in Redemption as the soul which is its inmate and

should be its mistress. We look for the _redemption of our body_ and the

_Resurrection of the Flesh_, we merit or demerit before God in our soul

for the deeds done in our body.

So was it too with our Lord of His infinite compassion. The _Word was

made Flesh_, dwelt in the Flesh, has assumed that Flesh into heaven.

Further, He suffered in the Flesh and deigned to tell us so; and that He

found that suffering all but intolerable.

II. In a well-known book a Catholic poet[1] describes with a great deal

of power the development of men's nervous systems in these later days,

and warns his readers against a scrupulous terror lest they, who no

longer scourge themselves with briers, should be neglecting a means of

sanctification. He points out, with perfect justice, that men, in these

days, suffer instead in more subtle manners than did those of the Middle

Ages, yet none the less physical; and puts us on our guard lest we

should afflict ourselves too much. Yet we must take care, also, that we

do not fall into the opposite extreme and come to regard bodily pain,

(as has been said) as if it were altogether too elementary for our

refined natures and as if it must have no place in the alchemy of the

spirit. This would be both dangerous and false. _What God hath joined

together, let no man put asunder!_ For, if we once treat body and soul

as ill-matched companions and seek to deal with them apart, instantly

the door is flung open to the old Gnostic horrors of sensualism on the

one side or inhuman mutilation or neglect on the other.

[Footnote 1: Health and Holiness by Francis Thompson.]

The Church, on the other hand, is very clear and insistent that body and

soul make one man as fully as God and Man make one Christ; and she

illustrates and directs these strange co-relations and mutual effects of

these two partners by her steady insistence on such things as Fasting

and Abstinence. And the saints are equally clear and insistent. There

never yet has been a single soul whom the Church has raised to her

altars in whose life bodily austerity in some form has not played a

considerable part. It is true that some have warned us against excess;

but what warnings and what excess! "Be moderate," advises St. Ignatius,

that most reasonable and moderate of all the saints. "Take care that you

do not break any bones with your iron scourge. God does not wish that!"

Pain, then, has a real place in our progress. Who that has suffered can

ever doubt it again?

Let us consider, therefore, under this Word of Christ, whether our

attitude to bodily pain is what God would have it to be. There are two

mistakes that we may be committing. Either we may fear it too

little--meet it, that is to say, with Pagan stoicism instead of with

Christianity--or we may fear it too much. _Despise not the chastening_,

on one side, _or faint_ on the other. It is surely the second warning

that is most needed now. For pain had a real place in Christ's programme

of life. He fasted for forty days at the beginning of His Ministry, and

He willed every shocking detail of the Praetorium and Calvary at the

end. He told us that _His Spirit willed it_ and, yet more kindly, that

_His Flesh was weak_. He revealed, then, that He really suffered and

that He willed it so.... _I thirst._

THE SIXTH WORD

_It is consummated._

He has finished _His Father's business_, He has dealt with sinners and

saints, and has finally disclosed to us the secrets of the Soul and the

Body of His that are the hope of both sinners and saints alike. And

there is no more for Him to do.

An entirely new Beginning, then, is at hand, now that the Last Sabbath

is come--the Last Sabbath, so much greater than the First as Redemption

is greater than Creation. For Creation is a mere introduction to the

Book of Life; it is the arrangement of materials that are to be thrown

instantly into confusion again by man, who should be its crown and

master. The Old Testament is one medley of mistakes and fragments and

broken promises and violated treaties, to reach its climax in the

capital Mistake of Calvary, when men indeed _knew not what they did._

And even God Himself in the New Testament, as man in the Old, has gone

down in the catastrophe and hangs here mutilated and broken. Real life,

then, is now to begin.

Yet, strangely enough, He calls it an End rather than a Beginning.

_Consummatum est!_

I. The one and only thing in human life that God desires to end is Sin.

There is not a pure joy or a sweet human relationship or a selfless

ambition or a divine hope which He does not desire to continue and to be

crowned and transfigured beyond all ambition and all hope. On the

contrary, He desires only to end that one single thing which ruins

relationships and spoils joy and poisons aspirations. For up to the

present there is not one page of history which has not this blot upon

it.

God has had to tolerate, for lack of better, such miserable specimens of

humanity! _Jacob have I loved!_ ... _David a man after my heart;_ the

one a poor, mean, calculating man, who had, however, that single glimmer

of the supernatural which Esau, for all his genial sturdiness, was

without; the other an adulterous murderer, who yet had grace enough for

real contrition. Hitherto He has been content with so little. He has

accepted vinegar for want of wine.

Next, God has had to tolerate, and indeed to sanction--such an unworthy

worship of Himself--all the blood of the temple and the spilled entrails

and the nameless horrors. And yet this was all to which men could rise;

for without it, they never could have learned the more nameless horror

of sin.

Last, for His worshippers He has had to content Himself with but one

People instead of _all peoples and nations and languages._ And what a

People,--whom even Moses could not bear for their treachery and

instability! And all this wretched record ends in the Crime of Calvary,

at which the very earth revolts and the sun grows dark with shame. Is it

any wonder that Christ cried, Thank God that is all done with at last!

II. Instead of this miserable past, then, what is to come? What is that

_New Wine He would drink with us in His Father's Kingdom?_ First; real

and complete saints of God are to take the place of the fragmentary

saints of the Old Dispensation, saints with heads of gold and feet of

clay. Souls are to be born again in Baptism, not merely sealed by

circumcision, and to be purified before they can contract any actual

guilt of their own. And, of these, many shall keep their baptismal

innocence and shall go, wearing that white robe, before God Who gave it

them. Others again shall lose it, but regain it once more, and, through

the power of the Precious Blood, shall rise to heights of which Jacob

and David never even dreamed. To _awake in His likeness_ was the

highest ambition of _the man after God's Heart;_ but to be not merely

like Christ, but one with Him, is the hope of the Christian. _I live_,

the new saints shall say with truth, _yet now not I, but Christ liveth

in me._

Next, instead of the old worship of blood and pain there shall be an

Unbloody Sacrifice and a _Pure Offering_ in which shall be all the power

and propitiation of Calvary without its pain, all the glory without the

degradation. And last, in place of the old enclosed Race of Israel shall

be a Church of all nations and tongues, one vast Society, with all walls

thrown down and all divisions done away, one Jerusalem from above, that

shall be the Mother of us all.

III. That, then, is what Christ intended as He cried, _It is

consummated._ Behold _the old things are passed away!_ Behold, _I make

all things new!_

And now let us see how far that is fulfilled. Where is there, in me, the

New Wine of the Gospel?

I have all that God can give me from His Throne on Calvary. I have the

truth that He proclaimed and the grace that He released. Yet is there in

me, up to the present, even one glimmer of what is meant by Sanctity? Am

I even within an appreciable distance of the saints who knew not Christ?

Have I ever wrestled like Jacob or wept like David? Has my religion,

that is to say, ever inspired me beyond the low elevation of joy into

the august altitudes of pain? Is it possible that with me the old is

not put away, the _old man_ is not yet dead, and the _new man_ not yet

_put on_? Is that New Sacrifice the light of my daily life? Have I done

anything except hinder the growth of Christ's Church, anything except

drag down her standards, so far as I am able, to my own low level? Is

there a single soul now in the world who owes, under God, her conversion

to my efforts?

Why, as I watch my life and review it in His Presence it would seem as

if I had done nothing but disappoint Him all my days! He cried, like the

deacon of His own Sacrifice, Go! it is done! _Ite; missa est!_ The

Sacrifice is finished here; go out in its strength to live the life

which it makes possible!

Let me at least begin to-day, have done with my old compromises and

shifts and evasions. _Ite; missa est!_

THE SEVENTH WORD

_Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit._

He has cried with a loud voice, and the rocks have rent to its echo, and

the earth is shaken, and the Veil of the Old Testament is torn from top

to bottom as the Old Covenant passes into the New and the enclosed

sanctity of the Most Holy Place breaks out into the world. And now, as

the level sun shines out again beneath the pall of clouds, He whispers,

as at Mary's knee in Nazareth, the old childish prayer and yields up

His spirit into His Father's hands.

The last Paradox, then, is uttered. He Who saves others cannot save

Himself! The Shepherd of souls relinquishes His own. For, as we cannot

save our lives unless we lose them for His sake, so He too cannot save

them unless He loses His for our sake.

I. This, then, is merely the summary of all that has gone before; it is

the word _Finis_ written at the end of this new Book of Life which He

has written in His Blood. It is the silence of the white space at the

close of the last page. Yet it is, too, the final act that gives value

to all that have preceded it. If Christ had not died, our faith would be

vain.

Oh! these New Theologies that see in Christ's Death merely the end of

His Life! Why, it is the very point and climax of His Life that He

should lay it down! Like Samson himself, that strange prototype of the

Strong Man armed, he slew more of the enemies of our souls by His Death

than by all His gracious Life. _For this cause He came into the world_.

For Sacrifice, which is the very heart of man's instinctive worship of

God, was set there, imperishably, in order to witness to and be ratified

by His One Offering which alone could truly take away sins; and to deny

it or to obscure it is to deny or to obscure the whole history of the

human race, from the Death of Abel to the Death of Christ, to deny or

obscure the significance of every lamb that bled in the Temple and of

every wine-offering poured out before the Holy Place, to deny or to

obscure (if we will but penetrate to the roots of things) the free will

of Man and the Love of God. If Christ had not died, our faith would be

vain.

II. Once again, then, let us turn to the event in our own lives that

closes them; that death which, united to Christ's, is our entrance into

liberty and, disunited, the supreme horror of existence.

(1) For without Christ death is a violent interruption to life,

introducing us to a new existence of which we know nothing, or to no

existence at all. Without Christ, however great our hopes, it is abrupt,

appalling, stunning, and shattering. It is this at the best, and, at the

worst, it is peaceful only as the death of a beast is peaceful.

(2) Yet, with Christ, it is harmonious and continuous with all that has

gone before, since it is the final movement of a life that is already

_dead with Christ_, the last stage of a process of mortality, and the

stage that ends its pain. It is just one more passing phase, by which is

changed the key of that music that every holy life makes always before

God.

There is, then, the choice. We may, if we will, die fighting to the end

a force that must conquer us however we may fight, resisting the

irresistible. Or we may die, in lethargic resignation, as dogs die,

without hopes or regrets, since the past, without Christ, is as

meaningless as the future. Or we may die, like Christ, and with Him,

yielding up a spirit that came from the Father back again into His

Fatherly hands, content that He Who brought us into the world should

receive us when we go out again, confident that, as the thread of His

purpose is plain in earthly life, it shall shine yet more plainly in the

life beyond.

One last look, then, at Jesus shows us the lines smoothed from His face

and the agony washed from His eyes. May our souls and the souls of all

the faithful departed, through His Mercy, rest in Him!

XI

LIFE AND DEATH

_As dying, and behold we live_.--II COR. VI. 9.

We have considered, so far, a number of paradoxical phenomena exhibited

in the life of Catholicism and have attempted to find their

reconciliation in the fact that the Catholic Church is at once Human and

Divine. In her striving, for example, after a Divine and supernatural

Peace, of which she alone possesses the secret, she _resists even unto

blood_ all human attempts to supplant this by another. As a human

society, again, she avails herself freely of human opportunities and

aids, of earthly and created beauty, for the setting forth of her

message; yet she can survive, as can no human society, when she is

deprived of her human rights and her acquired wealth. As human she

numbers the great multitude of the world's sinners among her children,

yet as Divine she has produced the saints. As Divine she bases all her

gospel on a Revelation which can be apprehended only by Faith, yet as

human she employs the keenest and most profound intellects for its

analysis and its propagation. In these and in many other similar points

it has been attempted to show why she offers now one aspect and now

another to human criticism, and how it is that the very charges made

against her become, when viewed in the light of her double claim, actual

credentials and arguments on behalf of that claim. Finally, in the

meditations upon the _Seven Words_ of Christ, we considered very briefly

how, in the hours of the deepest humiliation of His Humanity, He

revealed again and again the characteristics of His Divinity.

It now remains to consider that point in which she most manifests that

double nature of hers and, simultaneously therefore, presents, as in a

kind of climax, her identity, under human terms, with Him Who, Himself

the Lord of Life, conquered death by submitting to it and, by His

Resurrection from the dead, showed Himself _the Son of God with power_.

I. Death, the world tells us, is the final end of all things, and is the

one universal law of which evasion is impossible; and this is true, not

of the individual only, but of society, of nations, of civilization, and

even, it would seem, ultimately of physical life itself. Every vital

energy therefore that we possess can be directed not to the abolition,

but only to the postponement of this final full close to which the most

ecstatic created harmony must come at last.

Our physicians cannot heal us, they can merely ward off death for a

little. Our statesmen cannot establish an eternal federation, they can

but help to hold a crumbling society together for a little longer. Our

civilization cannot really evolve an immortal superman, it can but

render ordinary humanity a little less mortal, temporarily and in

outward appearance. Death, then, in the world's opinion, is the duellist

who is bound to win. We may parry, evade, leap aside for a little; we

may even advance upon him and seem to threaten his very existence; our

energies, in fact, must be concentrated upon this conflict if we are to

survive at all. But it is only in seeming, at the best. The moment must

come when, driven back to the last barrier, our last defence falters ...

and Death has only to wipe his sword.

Now the attitude of the Catholic Church towards Death is not only the

most violent reversal of the world's policy, but the most paradoxical,

too, of all her methods. For, while the world attempts to keep Death at

arm's length, the Church strives to embrace him. Where the world draws

his sword to meet Death's assault, the Church spreads her heart only to

receive it. She is in love with Death, she pursues him, honours him,

extols Him. She places over her altars not a Risen Christ, but a dying

One.

_If thou wilt be perfect_, she cries to the individual soul, _give up

all that thou hast and follow me_. "Give up all that makes life worth

living, strip thyself of every advantage that sustains thy life, of all

that makes thee effective." It is this that is her supreme appeal, not

indeed uttered, with all its corollaries, to all her children, but to

those only that desire perfection. Yet to all, in a sense, the appeal is

there. _Die daily_, die to self, mortify, yield, give in. If _any man

will save his life, he must lose it_.

So too, in her dealings with society, is her policy judged suicidal by a

world that is in love with its own kind of life. It is suicidal, cries

that world, to relinquish in France all on which the temporal life of

the Church depends; for how can that society survive which renounces the

very means of existence? It is suicidal to demand the virgin life of the

noblest of her children, suicidal to desert the monarchical cause of one

country, and to set herself in opposition to the Republican ideals of

another. For even she, after all, is human and must conform to human

conditions. Even she, however august her claims, must make terms with

the world if she desires to live in it.

And this comment has been made upon her actions in every age. She

condemned Arius, when a little compromise might surely have been found;

and lost half her children. She condemned Luther and lost Germany;

Elizabeth, and lost England. At every crisis she has made the wrong

choice, she has yielded when she should have resisted, resisted when she

should have yielded. The wonder is that she survives at all.

Yes, that is the wonder. _As dying, behold she lives_!

II. The answer of course is easy. It is that she simply does not desire

the kind of life which the world reckons alone to be life. To her that

is not life at all. She desires of course to survive as a human society,

and she is assured that she always shall so survive. Yet it is not on

the ordinary terms of ordinary society that she desires survival. It is

not a _natural_ life of which she is ambitious, a life that draws its

strength from human conditions and human environment, a life, therefore,

that waxes and wanes with those human conditions and ultimately meets

their fate, but a _supernatural_ life that draws its strength from God.

And she recognizes, as one of the most fundamental paradoxes of all,

that such a life can be gained and held only through what the world

calls "death."

She does not, then, want merely the life of a prosperous human state,

whether monarchy or republic. There are times indeed in her history when

such an accompaniment to her real existence is useful to her

effectiveness; and she has, of course, the right, as have other

societies, to earthly dominions that may have been won and presented to

her by her children. Or through her ministers, as in Paraguay, she may

administer for a while the ordinary civil affairs of men who choose to

be loyal to her government. Yet if, for one instant, such a

responsibility were really to threaten her spiritual effectiveness--if,

that is, the choice were really presented to her between spiritual and

temporal dominion--she would let all the kingdoms of the world go in an

instant, to retain her kingdom from God; she would gladly _suffer the

loss of all things_ to retain Christ.

And how is it possible to deny for one instant that her success has been

startling and overwhelming--this fructification of Life by Death.

Are there any human beings, for example, who have been more effective

and influential than her saints--men and women, that is to say, who have

_died daily_, in order to live indeed? They have not, it is true,

prospered, let us say, as business men, directors of companies, or

government officials, but such a success is simply not her ideal for

them, not their own ideal for themselves. That is precisely the kind of

life to which they have, as a rule, determinedly and perseveringly died.

Yet their effectiveness in this world has been none the less. Are any

kings remembered as is the beggar Labré who gnawed cabbage stalks in the

gutters of Rome? Are the names of any statesmen of, let us say, even a

hundred years ago, reverenced and repeated as is the name of the woman

of Spain called Teresa of Jesus who, four hundred years ago, ruled a few

nuns within the enclosure of a convent? Are any musicians or artists

loved to-day with such rapture as is God's little troubadour, called

Francis, who made music for himself and the angels by rubbing one stick

across another?

Or, again, is any empire that the world has ever seen so great, so

loyally united in itself, so universal and yet so rigorous as is that

spiritual empire whose capital is Rome? Is there any nation with so

fierce a patriotism as she who is Supernational? Earthly kings speak

from their thrones and what happens? And an old man in Rome who wears

three crowns on his head speaks from his prison in the Vatican and all

the earth rings with it.

Has her policy, then, been so suicidal after all? From the world's point

of view it has never been anything else. Her history is but one long

example of the sacrifice of human activities and earthly opportunities;

she has expelled from her pulpits the most brilliant of her children,

she has silenced or alienated the most eloquent of her defenders. She

has cut off from herself all that she should have kept, and hugged to

her arms all that she should have relinquished! She has never done

anything but die! She never does anything but live!

III. Turn, then, to the life of her Lord for the solution of this

riddle. Last week[1] He was going to His Death. He was losing, little by

little, all that bound Him to Life. The multitudes that had followed Him

hitherto were leaving Him by units and groups, they who might have

formed His armies to seat Him on the throne of His father David.

Disloyalty had made its way even among His chosen body-guard, and

already Judas is bargaining for the price of His Master's blood. Even

the most loyal of all are dismayed, and presently will _forsake Him and

flee_ when the swords flash out in the garden of Gethsemane. A few weeks

ago in Galilee thousands were leaving Him for the last time; and when,

once again, a company seemed to rally, He wept! And so at last the

sacrifice was complete and, one by one, He laid down of His own will

every tie that kept Him in life. And then on Good Friday itself He

suffered that beauty of His _Face to be marred_ so that no man would

ever _desire Him_ any more, silenced the melody of the Voice that had

broken so many hearts and made them whole again; He stretched out His

Shepherd's Hands with which alone He could gather His sheep to His

Breast, and the Feet that alone could bear Him into the wilderness to

_seek after that which was lost_. Was there ever a Suicide such as this,

such a despair of high hopes, such a ruin of all ambition, a dying so

complete and irremediable as the Dying of Jesus Christ?

[Footnote 1: This Sermon was preached on Easter Day.]

And now on Easter Day look at Him again and see how He lives as never

before. See how the Life that has been His for thirty years--the Life of

God made Man--itself pales almost to a phantom before the glory of that

same Life transfigured by Death. Three days ago He fainted beneath the

scourge and nails; now He shows the very scars of His Passion to be the

emblems of immortal strength. Three days ago He spoke in human words to

those only that were near Him, and limited Himself under human terms of

space and time; He speaks now in every heart. Three days ago He gave His

Body to the few who knelt at His Table; to-day in ten thousand

tabernacles that same Body may be worshipped by all who come.

In a word, He has exchanged a Natural Life for a Supernatural in every

plane at once. He has laid down the Natural Life of His Body to take it

back again supernaturalized for ever. He has died that His Life may be

released; He has _finished_ in order to begin.

It is easy, then, to see why it is that the Church _dies daily_, why it

is that she is content to be stripped of all that makes her life

effective, why she too permits her hands to be bound and her feet

fettered and her beauty marred and her voice silenced so far as men can

do those things. She is human? Yes; she dwells in a _body that is

prepared_ for her, but prepared chiefly that she may suffer in it. Her

far-reaching hands are not hers merely that she may bind up with them

the broken-hearted, nor her swift feet hers merely that she may run on

them to succour the perishing, nor her head and heart hers merely that

she may ponder and love. But all this sensitive human organism is hers

that at last she may agonize in it, bleed from it from a thousand

wounds, be lifted up in it to draw all men to her cross.

She does not desire, then, in this world, the _throne of her Father

David_, nor the kind of triumph which is the only kind that the world

understands to be so. She desires one life and one triumph only--the

Risen Life of her Saviour. And this, at last, is the transfiguration of

her Humanity by the power of her Divinity and the vindication of them

both.

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